by D. F. Bailey
They all smiled at this, at the fantasy that the digital division might save the print edition from insolvency. In any case, Finch felt relieved to have the story pitched in his direction. Something substantial to chew on instead of the bitter fruit of Bethany’s guilt and depression. And the tragedy with Buddy.
“All right.” Finch sat up in his chair. A jolt of energy radiated through his chest. In his gut he could feel the story coming back to life. He never expected the fraud trial to reach a satisfying conclusion. Now a new chapter opened before them. Everything had changed. “So. Fly to where? Portland? Interview the local sheriff, the coroner, and whoever bagged the bear. Right?”
“No.” Gimbel smiled with a miser’s grimace. “Drive to Astoria, the county seat of Clatsop County. Check the map. It’s on the rear end of the back of beyond. Take the company car,” he added after he remembered the photo of Finch’s destroyed Toyota. A total write-off. “And so far, no one has found the bear, dead or alive. But don’t let that stop you. Everyone loves to talk about the one that got away. I’m sure if anyone can pick up the story from there, you can.” He turned to Fiona. “Meanwhile, I want you to develop the human angle. For the first time, Toeplitz appears as a victim in this sorry tale. Did he have a wife? Kids?”
“No.” Finch shook his head. “No family at all. He was a childless orphan.” An interesting combination, he thought and then realized it was a circumstance he and Toeplitz now shared: no parents, no siblings, no spouse, no children.
Gimbel paused. “Then get Dean and Franklin Whitelaw’s reaction to Toeplitz’s demise. If he stonewalls you try Senator Whitelaw’s sons. They’re twins. The two boys were brought into the firm in the last few years. They probably knew Toeplitz, too. Or his daughters, there’s two or three of them. Remember, both of you, we don’t work at a newspaper anymore. We’re looking for the human dimension here — opinions, rumors, innuendo — not just the facts.” This was Gimbel’s new mantra based on his theory that print delivered news while the internet delivered opinion. Overall, Finch had to agree.
“You got it.” Fiona pulled her notes together and rose from her seat. “I’ll email you the files I gathered over the last month,” she said to Finch and pursed her lips, a sign that read: buckle up, we’re both in for a long ride.
Finch stood, ready to follow her when Wally raised a hand and said, “Hold up a minute, Will, I’ve got a few questions for you.”
※
Wally seemed nervous. A rare moment of hesitation gripped him. “I didn’t have time to check in with you.” His head wavered from side to side. “I mean about what kind of workload you can handle right now. Do you think you’re ready for this?”
Finch shrugged. Good of you to ask, he thought, but what I need more than anything is to slide into the old groove. More than that, to get back into my life. “I’m ready. Hell, I’m here a week earlier than anyone expected,” he said with a curt nod, and when he realized Gimbel needed more assurance he added, “Look, this new angle on Toeplitz might ease me back into the routine. After a day’s drive through the Redwoods, maybe I can step into the Whitelaw story through the back door.”
“Good.” Gimbel raised his eyes from the oak table and studied Finch’s face, unsure if he could carry the load so soon. “You know, normally we wouldn’t send anyone up to Oregon to dig through this mess with Toeplitz. A few phone calls would reel in the details. But since you’re back a week early and still technically on medical leave, it might prove a good way to bring you in.” Gimbel raised his eyebrows as if to add, so don’t treat it as a vacation.
When Finch sensed that his reliability was the issue he leaned forward and stared into his editor’s eyes. “Wally, look … it’s over. It’s been thirty-three days.” To lighten the mood he faked a smile, checked his watch and said, “Make that thirty-four.”
Gimbel gazed at Finch with an expression that softened his face. Not with pity, but with an air of empathy.
Finch could understand his concern. Gimbel had assembled the eXpress team only ten months ago. And eight months in, just as the Whitelaw trial began to gather a national following, Finch’s calamity hit. Wally had to assign Fiona to cover the trial while Finch checked out of the bog and into Eden Veil Center for Recovery. The bucolic retreat provided the space Will needed to come to terms with the black pit into which he’d stumbled, and then been shattered.
“I’m okay now. The month off did me some good. Really. It’s over, I’ve picked myself up and I know I have to move on,” he said and swept his hand toward the wall. “It’s all about my job now. That’s what I do.” The palm of his hand hit the table. “This is who I am now.”
Gimbel tipped his head to one side. “All right,” he whispered and set his fist against his mouth. He shifted his weight, a signal the meeting might soon be over, but then he settled again and angled his wide face toward his reporter. “And what about Bethany?”
Finch leaned back in his chair, a bit startled. This was getting personal. Six months ago, once they could trust one another, Wally had mentioned Bethany’s drinking. Said he knew where it could lead, that he’d lived through something similar himself. Will realized that his boss needed some assurance that this part of Finch’s world wouldn’t blowup again. “I haven’t see her in thirty-five days. She’s.…” He looked into his open hands, at the emptiness they held. “Look … she’s completely broken.” He narrowed his eyes. “You want the honest truth?”
Gimbel nodded.
“With luck, I’ll never see her again.”
Gimbel pressed his lips together and drew a long breath. “I know you think this is none of my business, but I need to know if you can stick this thing.”
Stick this thing? What did that mean? Could Finch stick with the job — or stick a knife into the part of his life destroyed by Bethany and surgically remove the diseased tissue? He fixed his eyes on the far wall. “Okay. Here’s the bare essentials, for your ears only: she’s been suspended from her job, with pay, pending the medical examiner’s report and criminal investigation. Likely there’ll be a trial for criminal negligence, maybe manslaughter. I hope so. If that sounds like revenge, then so be it. I’ll take my slice served cold.” His eyes narrowed. “As for me, I’ve moved into a one-bedroom place on South Van Ness while I’m looking for something better.” He exhaled as though he’d just climbed a steep flight of stairs. If nothing else, at least he still held a grip on the facts of his life.
Will had a sense that his managing editor wanted more, that he wanted to hear something about Buddy. But he felt that if either of them uttered Buddy’s name, some kind of emotional disaster could follow.
“South Van Ness?” Wally Gimbel shook his head doubtfully, then smiled, happy to divert their attention.
“Do you know how hard it is to find a place in San Francisco for two thousand dollars?” Will tried to fix a grin on his lips but instead looked away.
“All right,” Wally said and exhaled another long breath, a sigh of relief that they’d both survived this conversation — a topic that they had to resolve before they could move forward. “I’m going to give you a week,” he concluded. “Then you tell me if you can stick it.”
CHAPTER THREE
Donnel Smeardon eased the pack from his shoulders and checked to ensure his sweater and lunch bag covered the baggie of weed that Ben Argyle had ordered. Or demanded, was more like it. Then he jumped on his bike and coasted down the slope toward Astoria High School. He made a point of stopping at each intersection. Better to be safe than get busted again by another over-zealous cop. Talk about too much time on their hands. Especially now that Washington and Colorado had legalized pot. Rumor had it that Oregon might be next. He wondered if the new laws would put him out of business. Maybe. Or maybe he’d just have to move his product line up-scale. Crack, coke, H? The big leagues. He leaned forward and squeezed the hand brakes. Something about dealing heroin made him nervous.
“Donnel!”
He brought the bike to a stop a
nd looked into the alley off Jerome Avenue. Ben Argyle stood next to a cedar board fence, a worried look drawn across his face. Ben was pissed, Donnel was sure of that. And he’d feel even worse once Donnel delivered the bad news.
“Hey, Ben.” He hopped off his bike and parked it against the fence, then looked down the length of the gravel lane to see if anyone could sneak up on them. Coast clear, he slipped the pack onto the crossbar of his bike and began to unzip the inner pocket. “I got it.”
“You better,” Ben said but when he considered the look on Donnel’s face he added, “Got what?”
“The greens, man. Jesus, what else?”
“Greens? What are you talking about?” Ben scanned the alley and tried to focus on what he needed to say. “Look, my dad is going to shit if you don’t give his pistol back to me.”
Donnel Smeardon had his hand on the baggie of marijuana. He decided to wait a moment, to let things drift. Then he pressed forward. “You want this pot, or not?”
“Not now.” Ben curled his hands into fists and walked in a tight circle. “Fuck the pot.”
“Fuck the pot?” He zipped the pouch shut and stared at Ben. “Yesterday it was give me the pot. You were like Robert Fucking DeNiro for some greens. Now it’s fuck the pot?”
Ben squeezed his fists and for a moment tried to consider the options. The more he thought about their situation, the more he realized he had none. Soon he’d have to confess everything.
“Look, Dad inspects his guns every month. It’s like an obsession with him. If I don’t get that Glock back by Friday I know he’s going to the cops to report it. He has to. Don’t you get that? As far as he’s concerned it’s a stolen weapon.” He paused to see if this made any sense to Donnel. When he saw the dazed look in Donnel’s eyes he realized he needed something to make this better. Why had he ever agreed to help Donnel Smeardon? Another mystery. Unanswerable.
“Look, the cops are going to talk to everyone. Including me. Including you, Donnel.” He nodded his head with a sense of dread. “You said you needed it for one night. That was two weekends ago. Shit, why don’t you just give it back to me?”
Donnel pulled the pack straps over his shoulder and straddled his bike. “There’s problems, man.”
Ben leaned forward and pulled the left strap on Donnel’s pack into his hand. “Look, you’ve got to give me something. And right now.”
“Fuck you.” Donnel couldn’t miss the terror in Ben’s eyes. The depth of his fear unnerved him. “All right, just chill, okay?”
“Chill? You don’t get it. I want that gun. And right now.” He clenched his fist.
“All right, man. Here.” Donnel dug into the patch pocket on his jeans and presented an iPhone to Ben. “It’s an iPhone 6, man. Totally jail-breaked.” He passed the phone to Ben and tipped his head. “Probably costs more than your fucking Glock.”
Ben took the phone, gazed at it briefly and shoved it into his pocket. “You’ll get this back when I get the pistol,” he said. “And that better be by Friday.”
“Like I said, there’s problems. Stuff you don’t want to know about.”
“I don’t want to know?” Ben could feel his chest tighten. “You don’t want to know what’s going to happen if Dad calls you on this.”
“You mean if he calls you, on it.” Donnel pushed off with both feet and yelled over his shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’ll have it by Friday afternoon. Saturday morning at the latest.”
Ben watched Donnel glide toward the school, and wondered how he’d get through the rest of the week knowing the creep was likely to screw up so bad they’d both go down for this. His worst fear concerned the crushing disrespect from his father and mother. And there could be legal problems. Depending on what Donnel had done with the gun. Serious charges, even a trial. God only knew. He bunched his fists together and could feel tears welling in his eyes. The fact that his father was a teacher at his school only made things worse. He brushed the tears away with his jacket sleeve and trudged forward, for the first time in his life feeling the burden of a condemned soul.
※
On Tuesday evening Finch arrived in Astoria and checked into the Prest Motel. He decided to begin unravelling the story of Toeplitz’s death from the most authoritative source possible — the county sheriff. On Wednesday morning he drove up 7th Street to the gray, two-story Victorian building and parked the company car, a Ford Tempo, at the curb. Minutes later the receptionist pointed to the sheriff and said he was just about to take a break.
“Coffee’s on me,” Finch told him when they shook hands. At first the sheriff tried to put Finch off, but when the reporter explained that he only needed a few quotes and some color commentary about the bear attack, Sheriff Gruman waved a hand and told Finch to follow his squad car down to Three Cups Coffee House.
“No worries. Coffee’s always on the house for me,” he said. “But you can pay your own.”
Once he settled into the restaurant booth and set his notepad and phone recorder on the table, Finch looked at Sheriff Mark Gruman and studied his gnarled face. Gruman rubbed the scrub of whiskers on his goatee, rolled his eyes and looked away. His grizzled look matched the weariness of his manner, his pock-marked cheeks, the scars of adolescent acne. Finch imagined that he’d suffered from it as a kid. Social stigma, shunning — the sort of marginalization any fifteen-year-old might endure due to his appearance.
“You might not know this,” Gruman said, “but my staff have been cut by over half. During emergencies I have to deputize the locals. We call them swear-ins. Stick around long enough and you’ll be one of ‘em.” He leveled his torpid gaze at the reporter to confirm this was no joke. “I’m so flat out busy, I don’t even know if I’ve got time to talk to the press.” He pronounced press as though it began with a capital P, suggesting a rare brush with celebrity.
“Same story in my world, sheriff.” Guessing that it was a little early in the conversation to address him by his first name, Finch leaned closer as if he were sharing a mutual secret. “The newspaper industry is in tatters. I had to move over to the internet side of things to hang onto my job.”
Gruman dismissed this with a curt frown and gazed through the window.
The restaurant faced the remarkably wide mouth of the Columbia River. At this time of day the Three Cups Coffee House sat in the shadow of the exit ramp off the Astoria-Megler Bridge. The view, expansive and clear, captivated Finch. “I had no idea the river was so broad.”
“When the fog sets in, you can’t see the far side,” Gruman said. “It’s fourteen miles to get over to Washington.”
“Fog’s like that in San Francisco, too.” Finch lifted a glazed fritter in his right hand, smiled and nudged the side plate of desserts that he’d ordered toward the sheriff.
Gruman took a bite from a chocolate donut and set it aside. “Frisco.” He nodded with a sense of distant familiarity as he chewed on his donut. “We used to go almost every summer when I was a kid. Stayed with an uncle and aunt in Oakland. Frankly, it put me off cities generally,” he added with a wince.
“I can see why you live here.” Finch cast his eyes out to a rusty-looking freighter sliding under the bridge toward Asia. “Beautiful place. No question.” The conversation was headed nowhere.
Years of personal interviewing had taught Finch that empathy is the key to unlocking the most reticent personality. This primary principle was most effective whenever he had to deal with legal professionals, the people who knew the law by rote and could easily shield themselves from the duel of interrogation. “I don’t have to talk to you.” This sentence — or its many variations — was a typical defensive parry. Whenever Finch heard a lawyer, cop, judge, or detective utter these words he’d pause and then with a renewed sense of sympathy he’d say, “Look, I’m on your side. To ensure your point of view gets heard.”
But Gruman wasn’t about to open any doors. If he had something personal to hide, Finch wouldn’t know it. He tried to steer Gruman back to Toeplitz’s misadven
ture with the black bear. He’d already explained that since he’d covered most of the Whitelaw trial, the story of Toeplitz’s demise was the necessary bookend to the entire narrative.
“With the little time I do have I’ll tell you one thing,” Gruman said wiping his lips with a paper napkin. “One thing totally out of the ordinary.”
Finch leaned closer and his eyebrows knit together.
“The window on the driver’s side of the Mercedes was rolled all the way down.” Gruman’s eyes widened and he smiled as if he still couldn’t believe it. “There was no breakage of any kind. Obviously that bear, if we could find him, could tell us a lot. But one thing is sure: he didn’t have to break that window to haul Toeplitz from his car.” He devoured the last morsel of his donut, sucked his fingertips, then wiped them with the napkin while he considered Toeplitz’s situation. “Which has to make you wonder. Did Toeplitz stop the car before the bear appeared? Open his window for a breath of air? Did he have some kind of heart attack?” Gruman put these questions to Finch, certain that their answers could provide the only explanation for Toeplitz’s death.
“The autopsy might show that,” Finch said and made a note on his coil pad.
“Autopsy? Believe me, when I drove up there I could tell in two seconds that there was very little to examine, apart from a few scattered extremities.” Gruman sneered and tipped his head to suggest that Finch didn’t have a clue about the extreme trauma of Toeplitz’s final moments. “If you want to, check with Jennie Lee, the county medical examiner.”
“Jennie Lee.” He scrawled another note. “What about the crime scene report?”
Another dismissive sneer, this time broad enough to suggest that Gruman was tiring of Finch’s questions. “What crime? I guess to some of your readers, this all might seem like an offense against nature. Or by nature. But really, Mr. Finch, isn’t this story just a notch or two above dog-bites-man?” He sipped his coffee and stalled to see the response to this piece of logic. But Finch waited until he continued. “I suppose the headline to your story might be ‘Murder by Nature.’” Gruman smiled a snaggletoothed grin. He seemed quite pleased with this flash of inspiration.
