Unpunished

by Lisa Black

Roth shifted, alternating his ankle to knee pose. “Since the major corruption trials a few years ago and the county shakeup, Roger Correa has been doing the follow-up investigative pieces on the minor crooks who escaped the original fallout. The city alderman who got campaign workers to paint his house, the chick in the city manager’s office who somehow steered a landscaping bid to her husband’s company, that sort of thing. Correa has been working on this story in which county advertising space—spots for posters or advertisements in newsletters—has been underbid. He says the county property guy, some idiot named Martin, got together with people at each concern—the information office, the building manager who handles those glass display cases you see when you walk into City Hall, that kind of stuff—and conspired with them to bid less and less for the spaces.”

  Riley blinked. Jack’s mind had wandered off, wondering how one would convince a copy editor to go to the top of the roller towers. He pulled it back.

  “End result, the county property office is still charging the businesses the same amount for the advertising, but paying the county less than ever for the use of the space. Profit margin doubles, and he kicks some back to the individual managers. How this money actually changes hands is the last link in the chain that Correa had been yanking on.”

  “Okay,” Riley said.

  Roth said, “Bob wanted to hold the story until Correa figured out that last detail and got it verified. Correa considered said detail unimportant—he could prove that the rents had gone way down while the advert costs hadn’t, so ergo, extra money had to have been received that didn’t make it into county coffers. Good enough.”

  “What did you think?” Jack asked.

  “Eh, I was okay with Correa running with it. Let the—um—you guys figure out where the hard cash went. But I let Bob handle it. It was his decision.”

  “How irate did this Roger Correa get?”

  “Correa wakes up irate, and the day goes downhill from there. Before he started on this story it was the mayor’s secret girlfriend, but he could never get her on record, the county treasurer’s assistant buying a manicurist shop with staff for a couple bucks—which he did get on record—a grainy photo of the stadium contractor receiving an envelope or a napkin or a sack of burgers from a city councilman. Whatever story it is, he always insists it could have had a much bigger impact if only we’d written a different headline, put it on a different page, used five photos instead of one, and most importantly, given him more inches to work with. Column inches, I mean, right?” He chuckled as if he found Roger Correa’s temper a lovable foible, and maybe he did. Then he glanced at the cops and realized he’d gotten off topic.

  “He’d gripe to Bob, to me, to anyone who would listen. But they didn’t have any fistfights over it, not that I heard. Besides, that would hardly have made Bob kill himself. Roger, I could see, out of sheer frustration, emotional little shit that he is. But not Bob. Bob had, shall we say, an infallible sense of his own expertise.”

  Jack asked, “Anyone else? That he might have had a serious conflict with?”

  Roth frowned as if his patience had drained along with his coffee. “He accused Bart of plagiarism about a year ago, but that proved to be in error. Russo, Cannady, and Mills thought his headlines were too stuffy, and DeRosso thinks—thought—they were too silly. Palmer thought Davis never gave his photographs enough space, but since he won a Pulitzer a few years back his sense of expertise is a bit overdeveloped. As I said, normal. Every newspaper is like that and should be. If my people don’t think their stuff is worth fighting for, I don’t want them here.”

  Jack asked, “What about friends? Anyone he was particularly close to, palled around with? Confided in?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Ask Janelle, she probably saw the most of him. She’s the layout editor. Or you could ask, you know, his wife.” Something seemed to penetrate his tired brain, the idea that perhaps the officers were asking a lot of questions about a simple suicide. He was a newsman. “Why so much interest?”

  “We’re just trying to make sense of what happened. For the family’s sake,” Riley answered, but his primness smacked of evasion and acted upon the newsman as blood in the water affects a shark.

  Roth said, “I used to work the crime beat, you know, back when we still called it a crime beat. I’ve rolled up on a lot of suicides, and usually it’s Guy killed himself, too bad, so sad, end of story. So what’s with all the questions?”

  “Industrial setting,” Riley said with a brisk air. “Semipublic place, lots of people around. It’s different.”

  Roth did not appear remotely convinced.

  Chapter 6

  After security associate Rebecca started the video backup process, she escorted Maggie to Robert Davis’s office. “Office” turned out to be a bit of a misnomer, since the reporters and editors and copy editors all worked in the one huge room. Only a lucky few—the high-level editors like Franklin Roth, the affiliates editor, the sales director/circulation manager—were allotted the individual rooms along the upper level. The rank and file were slung into one churning pot of industry and ego.

  Industrial-size desks faced one another with a chest-high bulletin board in between, two at a time, spanning the room in slightly imperfect rows. Each writer had a set of file cabinets to border their area and at least one flat-screen monitor. The same messiness that had surrounded manual typewriters, however, persisted. Pens, paper clips, coffee mugs, the inevitable plastic sports bottles, business cards, notebooks, CDs, bags of chips and granola bars, photos of battle scenes and kids’ T-ball cards pinned side by side, flyers, press releases, novelty USB drives, and cell phone chargers covered the surfaces and sometimes spilled into open drawers. The only items missing were ashtrays and the errant bottle of Scotch. The building had been made smoke-free long ago, and anyway cigarettes were too expensive these days to leave lying around.

  Robert Davis’s desk had a spot at the end of one of the haphazard rows, with three monitors instead of two and an extra surface area for laying out copy. Maggie snapped a few photographs of the surfaces. She saw pictures of two brown-haired boys of about five and seven, the images caught on the fly as they rushed headlong toward a ball or a dog or a piece of cake, energy and impishness and complete joy evident in their stride. No picture of the wife, but then the desk didn’t have a lot of free space.

  She pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Past editions had been stacked to one side, printed stories or parts of stories and a few photos scattered across the rest. Robert Davis had liked Trident gum in wilder flavors and hadn’t been too fussy about washing out his coffee mug (a free gift from Progressive insurance). He did not have a bottle of Scotch in his bottom drawer or someone else’s wife’s panties stuffed in his ergonomic chair. He had not left blood spattered across his keyboard, or his cell phone, or signs of a struggle.

  “No note,” Rebecca pointed out. Maggie remembered in time that staff still believed the death a suicide.

  She moved the computer mouse. The monitor sprang to life in glorious Technicolor—or rather, 24-bit RGB. Davis had been working on a story by L. Russo about the latest round of school rankings and a story by Missy Cannady about the Cleveland Clinic’s latest specialty (Pediatric Endocrinology) coming to the Medical Mart building and the effect it might have on the project’s overall profit margin. Then a couple of paragraphs, no byline noted, about the New Horizons halfway house at East 22nd and Payne Avenue.

  If there was something in this worth murdering over, Maggie couldn’t see it.

  Rebecca left her, saying something about the day shift arriving soon, and Maggie snapped a photo of the monitor. She itched to shuffle through the papers on the desk but didn’t. That would be the detectives’ job, not hers. She disturbed nothing. Fortunately for her limited capability for patience, they showed up in short order. Then they shuffled.

  Reinforcements had arrived to talk to every employee who had been in the building during the relevant time period. Everyone on the printing and lo
ading staff had to be interviewed: What had they seen, heard, thought? Most of the truckers had already left. It was a newspaper, and nothing took precedence over getting those printed papers out to the public in time for their morning coffee. Not even murder.

  Besides, most of the loading staff had entry only to the loading dock. They could not enter the printing area, unless, of course, someone let them in.

  Jack sorted through the items on the desk while Riley took over the computer. He examined the same paste-up of stories Maggie had seen and reached the same conclusion: “Doesn’t look like anything earth-shattering to me.” He explored the rest of the computer’s desktop, having Maggie snap pictures here and there—his e-mails, the approved proofs of the paper that had just been printed, various folders of photos.

  Stories covered blurbs about road repair on Chester and a town hall meeting with the city’s mayor. More paragraphs were devoted to the bidding war between two doctors’ offices for the last Medical Mart vacancy and an alternative high school that closed because it turned out to be more of a day care for wayward teens than a place of instruction. Riley made a note of the school’s name, even though it had been shut down by the state and some irate parents, not as a result of investigative journalism.

  “Riveting,” Riley said. “No wonder they’re losing customers.”

  “But relevant to people’s actual lives,” Maggie said. In between reading over Riley’s shoulder, she read over Jack’s. He had discovered every reporter’s beating heart: a small, spiral-bound notebook half-full of barely legible scrawls. Even though Robert Davis had become a copy editor, the habit had remained. From all the paperwork on the desk she could tell the handwriting belonged to him . . . and he had inked his name on the creased front cover.

  The scrawls weren’t easy to make out. Something about sale, and H (maybe Herald, she thought—Kevin Harding had hinted that sale and bankruptcy hovered like twin vultures over every newsroom these days), and TM. Roth’s name had been mentioned here and there, along with Russo, Correa, and Truss. Jack frowned at the book, dwarfed by his large hand, obviously as perplexed as she felt.

  Riley snickered. “That Roth guy wasn’t kidding about Correa and his temper. E-mail sent yesterday: ‘This story needs to be front page above fold! Barkley will wring every last cent out of city coffers as managers sit around with thumbs up asses! You have balls the size of mustard seeds!!’ Guy uses more exclamation points than my daughter. And she’s in seventh grade.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the best analogy,” Maggie pointed out. “Aren’t mustard seeds renowned for growing into huge trees?”

  Both men glanced at her, conveying either astonishment at this profound insight or gentle pity that she, the female, just didn’t get it.

  “Who’s Barkley?” she countered.

  Riley muttered, “Maybe the guy who’s skimming the advertising space. Or—here’s another one from Correa with an attachment. A zoning map for Payne Avenue. Wow, exciting. And a note with it—‘Give me at least five inches, you fu’—hmm. You know, it’s kind of nice to be investigating grown-ups who leave clues in complete sentences. If I have to flick through one more set of Wh R u, stuf to crib YK text messages I’m going to both puke and sell my stock in Apple.”

  “Speaking of cell phones,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, I’d like to know where his went. Especially if it went into his killer’s pocket.”

  Maggie said, “Call the phone company. Maybe they can track the GPS.”

  “We don’t know which carrier he uses.”

  “Maybe it’s company issued.”

  “It’s not,” Jack said. “We asked. The Herald can no longer afford perks like that.”

  Riley clicked through a few more e-mails. “Then you know what we have to do.”

  “Yep,” Jack said. “It’s time to wake up the wife.”

  Chapter 7

  No one likes being woken up several hours before sunrise. No one especially likes being woken up to be told their spouse, their life partner, and the father of their children has been found dead. But Stephanie Davis didn’t seem to mind too much.

  At first she did. She turned pale with an expression of uncomprehending shock, as if the two men in her kitchen had materialized from the linoleum and begun spouting some alien language. They could not doubt that she had been woken up from slumber—the bleariness, mussed blond hair, and a slight crease in one cheek from a wrinkled pillow were unmistakable. She wore a flannel pajama set with cats on it and had never quite lost the baby weight. Jack didn’t think she had driven to the Herald offices, murdered her husband, somehow hefted his body up four flights of steps to dangle him from a railing, and then returned home to drift into a deep and untroubled sleep—but then, she could have had help.

  She could have been having an affair with one of Davis’s coworkers—hardly an unusual occurrence on this planet— who then killed his rival in a fit of rage while she slumbered, unaware. In that case, though she might have been unaware of her husband’s death, she would have all the answers to it.

  But that didn’t seem to fit, either. The death seemed a complete surprise. As is common with mothers, her first thoughts were for her children.

  “What am I going to tell them?” she said. “Bob wasn’t a super-involved dad—he was always at work—but of course he was their dad and the boys are only fourteen and seventeen. They’re too young yet to lose their father. . . .”

  Jack made her some tea. Riley waited patiently across the table from her. A mutt of a dog waited outside the sliding glass doors, wanting to know what was going on. He scratched at the glass but didn’t bark. No sounds came from the rest of the house; teenage boys sleep like—well, like the dead.

  They told her only that Robert Davis had been found hanging. If she had been behind some sort of conspiracy to murder, she should have jumped on the suicide idea.

  “I can’t see him killing himself.” Her voice shook, and so did her hands as she lifted the steaming mug. But her eyes were dry. “Not in a million years. Bob never seemed depressed. He didn’t even seem unhappy. Pensive, irritated, busy, stressed—but not unhappy. He loved his job. He felt a sense of—I don’t know, power, I guess, in being able to control other people’s stories.”

  “He enjoyed the power?”

  “Every man enjoys power,” she blurted, remembered her audience, and softened it. “I mean . . . of course he did. I’m not saying that he liked to throw his weight around. He cared about putting out a quality product. He felt that the entire industry is fighting for its life. He just . . . always believed he was right. About everything.”

  “Had he had any conflicts with anyone lately?”

  As the editor had, she snorted.

  Riley amended, “Anyone in particular? Lately?”

  “He was a copy editor,” she said, as if showing patience with a particularly dense child. Obviously Stephanie Davis, like the Herald’s editor, knew what that meant. Robert had probably described his responsibilities to her ad nauseam.

  But Riley persisted. “Any conflict feel especially pervasive? Get especially nasty?”

  “Enough for him to kill himself? No, not a chance. That’s just not what Bob would do.” Her stunned mind searched for words. “He had stopped talking to me about work. I’d come home every day—I’m a manager at Kohl’s—expecting to have him say that he had been laid off. The best that could happen would be for him to be moved over to the digital edition. That will stick around, yes, but the staff is minimal and it’s not profitable. None of it is profitable anymore.”

  “The editor insists Bob was not going to lose his job.”

  She warmed her hands around her mug, speaking listlessly but with certainty. “They don’t know. The Herald could be bought out on any given day like every other paper in the country; then some big corporation comes in and slashes jobs. It’s only a matter of time.” She spoke without hope, as if this painful truth had been accepted long ago.

  The dog whined, trying t
o catch her eye through the glass. She looked at the brown mongrel as if wondering where he came from.

  Riley tried to guide her back on topic. “So he didn’t mention conflicts or fights or maybe even a special project with anyone at the paper?”

  “No. Like I said, he didn’t talk about it anymore. Sometimes I’d get a hint from his phone calls, but only that.”

  “Phone calls?” Riley would have made a good shrink, Jack thought. He had the repeating back the last few words technique down pat.

  She crossed her arms over her chest, holding the flannel to herself, rubbing her arms in an unconscious and self-soothing gesture. “Lots of phone calls. That’s part of working at a paper. Decisions, last-minute problems, reporters calling at all hours to complain about how he treated their story. Mills called every week. Correa, especially.”

  “Roger Correa?”

  “Roger.” She smiled. “Fireplug of a guy with the energy of a fleet of fire trucks. Spouts off with the force of ten hoses, to continue the analogy.”

  Riley chuckled. “Are you a writer, too?”

  She said, too casually, “I tried. Bob said—well, it’s a tough business. Anyway, I kind of liked Roger. I couldn’t help it.”

  Jack asked, “You met him?”

  She gave a pftt of sound. “Bob worked there a long time. Dinners, company events, the awards ceremonies—I met everyone at some point.”

  “Okay. But Roger and Bob didn’t get along?”

  She gave a decisive shake of her head. “I doubt Roger gets along with anybody. Bob said Roger lived in some black-and-white fantasy world where reporters were white knights protecting the less fortunate. He thought all the good citizens of the city should unite and buy the paper to keep it going.” She chuckled. “Bob said that Roger went to bed every night and dreamt he was Humphrey Bogart in Deadline—U.S.A.”

  “What’s that?” Riley asked.

  Again that pitying look. “You’d better rent the DVD if you’re going to hang around reporters,” Stephanie Davis advised. “It’s their Bible, raison d’être, and call to arms all in one.”