by Jan Brogan
I was hoping Carolyn would come in early, too, but she was late, which was unusual for her. I’d checked police and fire in all three towns and written up three press releases by the time she arrived. Her eyes were swollen and she sneezed as she took off a lime-green ski jacket and fluffy purple scarf and hung them in the closet.
“You all right?” I asked, watching her pull a wad of Kleenex from the pocket of her jacket.
“You’re the one who almost got killed Friday night,” she said, sounding almost angry about it.
“I’m fine,” I said. No need to worry her with the details of my most recent brush with death.
“Animals in this world. Animals.” She flicked on her computer, sighed as it began the long process of booting up, and turned back to me. “That was a great story about that store owner yesterday. What’s his name, your friend? What a guy, that guy. I cried when I read it. I actually cried.”
“Barry,” I said. “Barry Mazursky.”
“Yeah, all that work for the veterans and shit. Why is it always the good guys who get shot in the head? Why don’t they go try to rob my ex’s auto-body shop and shoot him? Dirtbag population could use a little thinning. Why is it always the nice guys who stay with their wives twenty, thirty years—they’re the ones who get popped?”
“Yeah,” I said, in agreement, but I was trying to follow which ex-husband she meant and whether his murder would mean the end of the child-support payments she complained were too low. I got up and headed to our little kitchenette. “You want any coffee?” I called back.
Carolyn asked if we had any tea. I filled the Hotpot with water and waited for it to heat up. I was a little worried about the piece I’d written: Saint Barry Mazursky, innocent victim of random violence, the great husband who probably left his poor family with bad memories and staggering debts. But I told myself that there was no way I could have known on Saturday that Barry had embezzled from the Veterans’ Homeless Shelter. And confirming that Barry was a gambler didn’t necessarily confirm that he was an embezzler. Still, as the water began to bubble, I knew in my heart that it was all probably true.
In the same drawer where I found a sandwich bag full of Tetley tea bags, there was a small plastic container of honey along with packets of ketchup and barbecue sauce. I added the honey to Carolyn’s mug and took it to her. “You probably should have stayed home today,” I said, putting the mug on her desk.
“God knows, nobody downtown appreciates the effort I make to come in,” she said as she sipped the tea and scanned her screen for the day’s messages. She wore a good set of acrylic nails painted a dusty pink. They made a clicking sound on the keyboard.
I sat down at my own desk and leafed through the stack of public notices I’d meant to put up on the bulletin board. The South Kingstown Finance Committee was meeting this afternoon to weigh the school committee’s plan to renovate the elementary school. It was the most controversial budget item in town, and I felt the dead weight of it in my chest. How could I possibly sit through a tedious municipal meeting this afternoon? How could I come back here and make a story of it? Try to sound as if I cared?
I kept thinking about what Leonard had said when he’d dropped me off at my car Saturday night:
“You break that story a week before the election and it’s front-page news. That helps me, that helps you, and maybe that stops a few more people from ending up like Barry. ”
“Oh, they’re praising you on the Today Show.” Carolyn did not mean the actual network news program but the nickname for the Chronicle’s in-house daily computer file in which editors and reporters posted news, opinion, and out-and-out ranting.
I was instantly diverted by the mention of praise. “What does it say?”
“‘Bold, front-line reporting. Kudos to Ahern,’” Carolyn read aloud. “That’s from Nathan, the managing editor, and he’s real cheap with praise.
“‘Chilling story. Concise.’ That’s from Ernie Santos; he’s a copy editor.
“‘I mourned with the writer. What bureau does she work in, anyway? Does anyone know her?’” Carolyn laughed cynically. “That one’s unsigned, but you can tell it’s Nina Daggart; she mourns with the writer on every sad story.”
I couldn’t help but be pleased, but still, something was bothering me, holding me back, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” Carolyn asked, her infected, uneven voice beginning to warble. “Even Jonathan Frizell, who always has some kind of snotty sideways comment, couldn’t come up with anything negative to say.”
“I got a tip Saturday night,” I confided. “An anonymous tip—two hours past deadline, after I’d already filed my story—that Barry Mazursky was a compulsive gambler. Suspected of embezzling from the Veterans’ Homeless Shelter when he was treasurer, and deep in debt to some loan sharks who finally ran out of patience.”
“You mean, and knocked him off?”
I nodded.
“Loan sharks don’t usually do that. It makes it tough to collect.”
“Maybe the killer only meant to apply a little pressure and then Barry pulled his own gun. I don’t know, but the compulsive gambling checks out. I took a ride down to Mohegan Sun yesterday where, apparently, Barry Mazursky was a regular.”
Carolyn considered this. “So what’s the problem? You got a good tip that checked out?”
“My story in Sunday’s paper practically eulogized Barry as divine, for Christ’s sake.”
She waved that off. “So you quoted a bunch of people who wanted to canonize the guy. Like reporters here haven’t canonized every single victim of every single tragedy that made the front page. Whoever died was Mother Teresa. No one wants to say the guy with the bullet holes deserved it. No one.”
The knot in my stomach began to soften. Still, I told myself that there were turf politics to consider. As a South County reporter, I was supposed to stick to my own territory and report on Narragansett, South Kingstown, and North Kingstown. I had no intrinsic right to a Providence story requiring in-depth investigation, no matter what my prior experience.
Carolyn grabbed a tissue and began blowing her nose, but over the tissue, her eyes were watery and confused. The question I saw echoed in my head. What was wrong with me?
I knew, then, that it wasn’t my story about Barry or turf politics that was stopping me. They were excuses. What was stopping me was the silver sedan gunning for my back, the fear that next time it might be a bullet hole oozing blood from my forehead.
“By the way, I heard Jonathan Frizell is after that job you want on the investigative team,” she said. “You want that job, you better make your move.”
“I’m planning on pitching this story downtown,” I heard myself say. “‘Murder Tied to Casino Gambling’—two weeks before the referendum.”
“You gotta.” Carolyn sniffed, crumpled her tissue into a ball, tried to toss it into the trash and missed. Then a new thought occurred to her. “Hey, this is going to screw me, big time! I’ll be stuck trying to cover this bureau alone. They better damn well send someone from West Bay out here to fill in while you’re gone.”
“Anonymous?” Dorothy Sacks asked. “You mean you don’t know who is passing you this information?”
I immediately felt like an idiot. “Not anonymous, I guess. Confidential.”
“A confidential source?”
“Yes.”
“That you trust?” Something in her inflection told me to be wary.
I happened to glance down from the telephone and caught a glimpse of the bronze reporting award in the bottom drawer of my desk. I thought about what Walter had said, about proving that the Tejian story was a onetime mistake. “I don’t trust anybody until the information checks out.”
She gave a dry little laugh. “Meet me in the newsroom at four o’clock.”
Although Providence is a smaller city than Boston, the newsroom of the Chronicle was larger and better furnished than the Ledger’s. It was the sam
e open-office layout—a sea of desks in the middle, with private cubicles along two walls—but the carpeting was hotel grade instead of industrial, and the computers were brand new, with large, thin screens. Everything on the walls, even the bulletin boards, was expensively framed.
When I’d first interviewed here, this upscale and oddly tasteful newsroom had comforted me, made me think that maybe my journalistic progression from the Ledger to the Chronicle wasn’t such a big step down. And the editors had reiterated that point: The Chronicle Company was one of the last remaining family-owned papers in the country, not part of a chain. It had standards. High standards. Reporters were expected to meet those standards.
Now, as I approached this newsroom, crowded and whirring with industry at four o’clock in the afternoon, I was determined not to be intimidated by the furnishings or the standards. I had been a member of the investigative team at a much larger newspaper in a much larger city. This was a good story. And timely. The referendum to legalize gambling was little more than two weeks away.
I found Dorothy Sacks at her desk in City, on the phone. She waved to me, as if to say to sit down. I looked around. Every chair was occupied by either an editor or a reporter deep in concentration before a computer screen, so I stood waiting in the perimeter corridor between the last row of desks and the wall.
I studied one of the bulletin boards. The Chronicle had something it called a writing committee, which was a group of reporters who got together to decide what was the best newspaper story of the month. The winner was posted on the bulletin board.
Carolyn had no use for the writing committee. She said it was made up of a bunch of artistes who put on French berets, drank espresso, and hid in the cafeteria pretending they were existentialists. I took this to mean that none of her stories had ever been nominated.
I studied last month’s winner. Jonathan Frizell had gotten an in-depth interview with the mayor after his top aide was charged with taking kickbacks from a private tow operator who wanted city business. In response, the mayor had insisted that these kinds of spurious charges were always leveled at city officials, and that in America, “people are innocent until proven guilty.” The story captured the mayor in all his colorful good humor, but it was clear from the tone of the article that the Chronicle wasn’t buying any of it.
“We’re meeting in there,” Dorothy Sacks said. She was off the phone, standing and pointing in the direction of a small conference room. I followed her down the aisle between desks to the small room, glassed in on three sides.
Dorothy gestured for me to take a seat at the conference table. She glanced first at a utilitarian-looking Timex on her wrist, then over her shoulder into the newsroom. “Nathan and Marcy want to hear your idea. They should be here any minute.”
Nathan Goldstein was the managing editor who had liked my story. Marcy Kittner was the state editor in charge of the bureaus, which made her Carolyn’s direct boss. As I peered through the glass and into the newsroom to see if they were coming, I noticed several reporters leaning forward from their desks, trying to see in.
“Welcome to the Fishbowl,” Dorothy said.
“Loved your story,” said Nathan Goldstein. He walked with a slouch and muttered this praise without looking at me, tossing a notebook on the conference table. I wasn’t even sure he was talking to me. But then, after seating himself at the far end of the table, he looked up suddenly, his eyes small, bright arrows.
He was waiting for my reply.
“Thank you,” I said, probably too late.
Marcy didn’t say anything. She had taken the seat next to me and was now writing something on a pad of paper. She was wearing a rose-scented perfume that was a little too much in this small, windowless room.
“Let’s hear about your tip,” Nathan said, with an expansive hand gesture that might have been an attempt to wave in some fresh air.
I told him about the charity embezzlement and about my trip to Mohegan Sun, which confirmed that Barry was a compulsive gambler. “My source says Mazursky told him he had to go to the street for loans to cover the embezzlement. He says Mazursky was a deadbeat and a cheat. And that his murder was a hit, a message to all the other deadbeats out there.”
Nathan’s way of not looking directly at you made his response difficult to read. Marcy was transparent. “Please?” she asked. This was a Rhode Island expression that meant, Excuse me? What? And in this case, Could I possibly be hearing right? “Didn’t your profile about Mazursky talk about what a wonderful community volunteer he was?”
“It did,” I said, striving not to sound defensive. “This tip came in a few hours after deadline. By someone who knew the other side of Barry—”
“Someone willing to go on the record?” Nathan asked.
I shook my head. “It’s a confidential source.”
Marcy gave Nathan a look. Theoretically, newspapers didn’t like the use of confidential sources. In practice, the Chronicle stories quoted confidential sources all the time.
“If you read her original story about the shooting, a hit makes sense,” Dorothy interjected. “Even when I was editing it, it struck me; it all seemed so fast. And police are being incredibly tight-lipped. They haven’t even confirmed how much cash was stolen.”
Nathan’s head tilted slightly, an indication that he was listening, but his eyes had dropped to a note he’d written himself on a legal pad. “How much a part of the criminal investigation is she?” he asked Dorothy. “I don’t want her reporting if she’s the prosecution’s key witness.”
“I’ve been told I’m very low level,” I said. “I was in the back of the store. Didn’t see it happen. Can’t make a credible ID.”
That seemed to settle something for him. He made another note. “So what exactly do you propose?”
Unsure who he was addressing, Dorothy and I looked at each other. After a moment of confused silence, Nathan’s eyes darted between us impatiently, as if wondering why the delay.
“I’d like to be put on special assignment to do an in-depth investigation,” I began. “See if I can get my hands on a credit report and confirm Barry’s debt problems. Interview his wife—if she’ll talk to me, tell me if there were any threats. See if she’s willing to go on the record about Barry’s gambling.…”
Nathan scribbled something on his legal pad.
“How do we know this source of hers is reliable and not just stringing us along?” Marcy asked Dorothy.
“Well, you never really know, do you?” Dorothy replied. “You always take some risk that you might waste time traveling up the wrong road. It’s called the newspaper business.” To Nathan she said, “Hallie isn’t some neophyte. She won awards for her investigative work at the Ledger. She knows she has to confirm everything independently.”
“How much time will that take?” Marcy asked.
“The story would have to run before the referendum. So we’re talking two weeks, on the outside.” Dorothy addressed this to Nathan, who appeared to check this against the calendar in his Day-Timer.
On the other side of the dome of silence, I could see that several other reporters had gathered at the nearest desk and were unabashedly watching our meeting. I wondered how many of these reporters’ pitches went on in a day, and if these spectators had a betting pool on who got the assignments.
Marcy was not about to concede. “Shouldn’t Jonathan be following this? It’s not like I have so much staff I can spare to take a reporter out of South County for a couple of weeks.”
“I’m short staffed because of all the referendum rallies. And Jonathan’s wrapped up in his own investigation.” Dorothy and Nathan exchanged a meaningful look. Then she added, “Besides, Hallie was the on-scene reporter.”
They all nodded at this, and I guessed this was some sort of Chronicle policy—something along the lines of finders keepers, losers weepers. Finally, Marcy wrote something on her notepad, ripped out the piece of paper, and pushed it across the table to Nathan. It appeared to be a list of name
s, possibly names of reporters already committed to various assignments. He studied it thoughtfully and turned to Dorothy. “Stateside does have a manpower issue.”
“We all have manpower issues,” Dorothy said matter-of-factly. “We still have to cover the news.”
Nathan considered Marcy’s list for another minute and slipped it into his legal pad. Then he capped his pen and used it to scratch vigorously behind his ear. “Frankly, I’m not sure I see the point in directing any manpower at all to this story.” He addressed this to Dorothy. “We run the real risk of defaming a dead man. Upsetting the family. Possible libel. For what? Another story about a compulsive gambler? Who cares?”
Marcy practically gleamed in triumph. Dorothy looked struck.
I took a deep breath and could taste the rose scent of Marcy’s perfume on my teeth. “Billy Lopresti cares,” I heard myself say.
All eyes shot up at once. Nathan halted in the middle of an ear scratch and used the pen to gesture to me to continue.
“My source is convinced that Lopresti is exerting pressure on the police force to stall this investigation until after the referendum vote.”
Dorothy gave Nathan a piercing look, which did not escape Marcy’s attention. She narrowed her eyes, knowing she’d been left out of the loop on something, and folded her arms, waiting for Nathan’s response. He studied the pen for a minute, as if there were writing on the side he was trying to interpret, and then clasped it in the palm of his other hand. “Does your source have any proof of this?” he asked.
“No,” I admitted. “It’s just a tip. But as you know, Billy Lopresti has a lot riding on the referendum outcome, a lot of jobs and contracts to dole out with the Pier Project. I’d need to work with the city hall reporter to flesh it out. Or someone who can guide me to some good inner sources.”
“She could work with Jonathan,” Dorothy said quietly.
Nathan nodded, and I remembered what Dorothy had said earlier about Jonathan being already tied up with an investigation. I began to understand the meaningful looks. Frizell must already be working on something that tied into Leonard’s theory about Lopresti’s tight hold on the police department.
