The police officer asked, “What happened?”
Someone said the car was black.
Someone said it was dark green.
Someone said there were three teenagers in the car.
Someone said it was two teenagers and a kid.
Someone said they yelled “Bandits Rule!”
Someone said they yelled “Motherfuckers!”
Someone said it was an M-80 that was thrown through the window.
Someone else said it was a bunch of firecrackers in a bottle.
The bomb and arson squad got down to the real nitty-gritty. They said it was gasoline in a mayo jar with duct tape around the seal and a greasy rag for a wick.
Apparently the Bandits had tried to get revenge against the Rockies by firebombing Little Cap’s mother’s house. They had hoped to kill somebody. By the grace of God they hadn’t.
Audrey would live, but she would have an ugly scar from the three-inch gash on her forehead. She was trembling when she was put into the ambulance. It took about twenty minutes for Doug to get there. He looked at me with a vicious scowl. “What are you doing here?”
“Selling Mary Kay so I can get a pink Caddy?”
“A smart mouth will get you in bad,” he snapped.
My grandmother used to say that.
“Georgia, how’d you find out about Little Cap’s mother?”
“I’ve got sources,” I lied. I started to say I’m nosy and I’ve got eyes but too much smart mouth really will get you in bad-and I was in enough bad already.
“Don’t play me, Georgia. Don’t ever fuckin’ play me.”
“You owed me, Doug,” I said, and didn’t even blink.
After about five seconds of our stare-down, he relented. “Are you okay?” Doug held his belligerent tone like Patti LaBelle holds that last note on “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
“Yeah, just tired and shaken up. I gave the other detectives my statement. Things are getting hot, huh?”
“For real.”
“Doug, you guys have got to find Butter. Things are getting too hot-they might just decide to . . .”
Doug nodded because he understood far too well.
I used my cell phone to call the station. I had them rush a crew out to shoot the scene. This would be the top to my story tonight at six when I updated Butter’s case. I would talk to Butter’s family, too, and likely be live from their house. I had the lead story.
Or so I thought.
E L E V E N
I got big-footed—the ultimate insult to a TV news reporter.
After my crew got finished shooting video of the scene and a quick interview, I trailed them back to the station. It was now about 1:00 in the afternoon.
I didn’t feel like getting hit flush in the face with some mess so I decided to call one of my girls at the station to see what the buzz was. I knew people were talking about me: one for iging the page this morning and two for being at the house when it was firebombed.
Journalists are natural humbuggers. It’s the curiosity in them. It’s the energy and creativity in them. It’s the daily burden of always having to be factual and prompt within seconds for their jobs. Something will happen in a newsroom, something big or small, the taste of it will get in folks’ mouths, and, like a bad cold, it spreads from one person to another, almost invisibly, with speed and power and no common cure.
I knew they were dogging me today with all that was going on with this story so I called my friend Clarice, who is a researcher on the assignment desk and always has the scoop. I called her direct line and listened to her cigarette-roughened voice: “Channel 8, we get you the news first!”
“It’s me, girl.”
“Georgia,” she whispered. “Are you okay? I heard about what happened! I was worried to death!”
“It was crazy but I’m fine. I’m on the way in now. Listen, what’s going on there at the station?”
“No,” Clarice said, cutting me off. “I haven’t heard about that organization.”
Somebody must be standing around her desk and she couldn’t talk. So I did the talking. “Clarice, I got some negative pub in the Defender today, plus I blew off a page this morning. I need to know if the do-do is hitting the wind machine or not.”
“Well, what I can do is this,” she said in her same even-toned voice. “In a few minutes, I’ll go back and check my mailbox for your organization’s press kit, then I can talk to you at length about whether or not it would be a story our station might cover, how’s that?”
That was a little sister secret code we had. That meant that Clarice was going to go float around the newsroom and hear what people were saying about what had happened this morning when I didn’t call in. Then Clarice would meet me in the back office where the staff mailboxes and schedules were posted. It was out of the way and had very little traffic.
I entered the building from the rear. I was waiting at our designated meeting spot for less than five minutes when Clarice walked up and said, “Hey, Georgia.”
Clarice’s physical appearance is juxtaposed with her personality. Her gritty voice and outgoing personality do not match her dainty body. Clarice is a petite person: little hands, little feet, size 6 dress, about five-two, and delicate features. She likes to sit at her desk, legs crossed, leaning forward with her elbows on the desk, poring over some AP wire copy with a cigarette smoldering nearby in some wacky, freebie ashtray that came in the mail. Clarice was working a cigarette butt now.
She said, “Made the paper, huh?”
“I know! I couldn’t believe they dogged me like that.”
“I think that sometimes print journalists like to take a swipe at broadcast journalists because we pimp so many of their stories. You know how sometimes we let them break the story and then we hop on it later and don’t always give them credit. This is just a little payback. I don’t think it’s personal.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” I said. “It still stings though. But listen, tell me, what’d you hear?”
“Some people talking around the assignment desk were saying that you got beat on the story yesterday—”
“Beat! I did not get beat!”
“Ssssh!” Clarice said, taking a long pull off her cigarette before dropping it on the tile floor and putting it out with a twist of the toe. “Do you want someone walking by to hear?”
I lowered my voice but not my rage. “Clarice, I knew that the Rockies had Butter!”
“Well, why didn’t you put that in your story?”
“Because Doug asked me not to. He asked the whole family to keep a lid on it because he thought leaking information would make it harder to find Butter! But Reverend Walker didn’t cooperate.”
“Who is Doug?”
“Doug Eckart. He’s the detective working the drive-by and he’s also trying to help find Butter.”
“Wait a minute! I was helping do some research for a piece about two months ago and I had to go out and interview a cop. He turned out to be a fine brother. He was tall, reddish brown, long lashes, fine eyebrows, and . . . and—”
“That was Doug!”
“Yeah, and as I recall he’s single—I didn’t see a ring or anything, never mentioned a wife. So after this is over, are y’all going to get a little thang going?”
“Don’t start.”
“C’mon, tell me!”
“Clarice, I’m trying not to put my business in the street.”
She grinned. “Well, just think of me as a dead end, it’s not going anywhere. C’mon, I’m your girl, remember?”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “You are. And yeah I like him. There’s just something about him. He’s good-looking, he seems real dedicated, we’ve been flirting, but so far on the romantic tip there’s nothing for certain . . .”
“Yet.” Clarice winked at me. “A brother that fine, you’ve got to be trying to hook up with him, huh?”
“Well, I’m still trying to get over Max, I don’t need any drama!”
“Doug cou
ld be the break you need! It’s not like good-looking, working brothers pop up in a sister’s life every day now. I think you should—”
“Clarice, get off that and get down to the gristle. What did they say about me not coming in when I was paged?”
“Well, they started dogging you out, saying that you didn’t answer the page because you were embarrassed about getting beat on the story and getting dissed in the paper.”
“Who said that?”
“This one and that one. Now what I’m going to tell you next is really going to make you angry. Don’t go off, okay?”
“Do I ever go off?”
“Off the deepest of ends and with more regularity than Correctol!”
“Shut up! But . . . I promise.”
“Okay. They’ve big-footed you.”
I got big-footed. Big-footed meant that they kicked one reporter off something important and put the person considered the bigger star on the story. “With whom?”
“Brent Manning.”
“Those low-down dirty dogs! Brent Manning makes me sick! Everybody in this station knows I can’t stand him. They deliberately gave him my story to get on my last nerve.”
Brent Manning was one of those guys who thinks he’s all that, and while he’s good, he’s not Scoop the Journalism God. Brent is TV news; the man is cut from network tape. He’s lanky, with chiseled features, blue eyes, blond hair, and he’s aggressive like nobody’s business. He can smell a story a mile away. Brent is doggish about news, too, always criticizing something and somebody because he’s a perfectionist. Now he was on my story and getting it back would be like trying to get my arm out of a pit bull’s mouth. “Where is Brent now?”
“I heard that he’s out going on a ride-along with one of the beat cops in the neighborhood. You know, they’ve got flyers of this kid and they’re supposed to go door-to-door canvassing the neighborhood.”
“Thanks, C!” I hugged her and went to my desk.
I was going to go see my boss, Bing. But I kept getting sidetracked. People kept stopping by my desk, asking if I was okay, and riding me about getting dogged in the paper. There was already a Post-it on the computer that said Bing wanted to see me. Some tattletale must have told him I was in, because Bing came right up behind me and noted, “Obviously you’re okay. Good.”
The crowd around me flew. Bing could clear a room faster than fire. He grunted. “Georgia, my office.”
We walked to his office in silence. Bing sat at his desk where he had been watching an air-check, which is a recorded copy of a live broadcast. It was a copy of last night’s ten o’clock news, currently set on pause.
“Now,” Bing said with a dissatisfied look on his face, “your story last night made no mention that this missing kid case is gang related.”
Pride wanted me to say I knew. Instinct wanted me to lie. But as my grandmother used to say, pride goeth before a fall. “I had a hint of it but I couldn’t confirm it so I didn’t go with it. I didn’t want to risk being wrong and escalating the gang situation there.”
Bing talked about me like a D-O-G. As he ranted and raved I was a silent spectator, stuck and unamused. I waited patiently for him to take a break. “Bing, I heard that you put Brent on this story,” I finally managed to get in. “I heard that you want me to do the fire-bombing and that’s it. But I want it all. Put me back on the story and I’ll be on top of it.”
“Brent’s the best reporter in this shop.”
Oh, no, he didn’t go there. I snapped, “Brent’s a North Shore boy. He knows Lincoln Park and the oyster-eaters who live there. This is a South Side story—Englewood and fried shrimp. He doesn’t know the community. He doesn’t know the people. I doubt if he even knows that Chicago was founded by a black man.”
“Don’t be patronizing! You blew it!” Bing raged. “Not only did you get beat, Georgia, you didn’t answer your page this morning!”
“My pager’s broken!” I lied.
“We had to get somebody else on the story, so we sent our top gun.”
“C’mon, Bing! This story belongs to me like the last shot belongs to Michael Jordan and you know it.”
“It’s Brent’s ball now.”
I picked up the newspaper on his desk. “I don’t like being made fun of publicly and I feel responsible for Butter getting on-air. In fact, she wouldn’t have gotten on if you hadn’t prodded me into it. Remember, Bing?”
God must have struck him deaf and dumb for a minute because he didn’t say a mumbling word. Finally, Bing released the pause button on the ten o’clock air-check and turned toward the set. “End of discussion, Georgia.”
I had to get back on the story. But how? How could I bump Brent? I went back and sat at my desk and thought about it. Then I got an idea.
I picked up the phone and sat low because I didn’t want anyone to interrupt my call. I phoned Butter’s house. Kelly answered; I knew her voice by now. “Kelly, hi, it’s Georgia.”
“Heard anythin’?” she asked.
“No, but I know personally that the police are working very hard on the case—”
“Reverend says—”
“Kelly, I know what Reverend Walker thinks. I saw the paper today. Detective Eckart asked your family not to tell anyone about the gang connection.”
“I know, but Reverend told Mama it would be better to shake up things. He said that would help. Reverend’s the one who called the newspaper reporter.”
“I respect the Reverend,” I said, without adding that I was mad as a bear at him, “but I got nailed in that article and I’ve been doing nothing but trying to help you from the very beginning.”
“I ain’t see it. We didn’t say nothing bad about you. Mama likes you. Trip too. We just want Butter back. Later for all the rest of that stuff.”
“I know. That’s all I want, too, Butter back home safe. You believe that don’t you, Kelly?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Okay. I want to stay on this story, but to do that I need a favor. I need this favor bad so we can keep working together and get Butter back.”
“What?”
“TV reporters are going to be calling you up for interviews today.”
“Yeah, Channel 3 and 10 called already!”
“Okay, now my station is sending a reporter out named Brent Manning—”
“He called, too, said he’d be by.”
“Right. Kelly, don’t talk to him. Give the other stations their interviews, but don’t talk to Brent. Tell him you don’t feel comfortable talking to anyone at my station but me. Period.”
“Okay, no one but you at Channel 8.”
“Right.”
“Okay, I promise and I’ll make sure he don’t get in. Nobody but you, Georgia.”
“Thanks, Kelly. I’ve got a feeling I’ll be seeing you fairly soon.”
I hung up, signed on to my computer. I checked the assignment desk’s daily log. It listed the stories we were covering, the reporter assigned, and the crew sent with the reporter. The log entry read: Missing Kid. Manning. Unit 23. Great! They’d sent Brent with Zeke because he’s been covering the story with me and knows the area and all the players. But Zeke hates Brent Manning as much as I do. I called his truck and prayed that he was in it.
“Unit 23!” Zeke answered.
“Zeke, it’s Georgia but don’t let on.”
“Yeah.”
“Is Brent in the truck with you?”
“Yeah, I keep telling you maintenance guys that something smells shitty in here.”
“So you know they took me off the story and put him on.”
“Yeah.”
“I need your help, and I know you can’t stand Brent any more than I can.”
“Yeah, man, I really want to get this smell out of my truck!”
“Great. Do me a favor. When you get to the Stewart house, they’re not going to let you in—”
“Really?”
“—I asked them to freeze out Brent so I can get back on this story-”
“I hear you.”
“—but he’ll never tell the powers that be back here that he can’t get in for an interview. Zeke, I need you to call back to the station, rant and rave that we’re not going to have anything, and that we’ll get totally beat unless they get me back out there!”
Details at Ten Page 9
