Spiked

by Mark Arsenault

The chief looked at his shoes to see if his pants were down. Trapped, he gave up the info. “We believe our officers have found the weapon, which could have been dropped when the shooter jumped the fence around the basketball court.”

  That was all Eddie could get; the chief was back on guard. He thanked him and ran out of there. Cars honked in protest as Eddie ignored the signal lights and dashed across the intersection toward the Empire Building.

  Phife called out the moment Eddie burst off the elevator. “Twenty minutes, Eddie. I need time to read it.”

  Eddie nodded and slammed into his chair. A paper cup on his desk held two inches of tepid coffee the color of potting soil. It had been terrible on Friday when it was fresh from the vending machine. Eddie downed it in one gulp and pounded the keyboard with his middle fingers:

  LOWELL—An argument over impure cocaine burst into violence early this morning when a man fired two gunshots into a crowd on Lila Street, wounding a teenaged runaway who was not involved in any drug transaction, police said.

  He probably could write a better opening with more time, but it would do. He phoned the hospital and asked about the victim; she was listed in good condition with a wound in the shoulder. In a second paragraph, Eddie typed her name and her prognosis. In a perfect world, he’d call her family for comment, but deadline is imperfect.

  The third graph stated plainly that the shooter fled and got away. The fourth, that police had recovered a gun. It was the one detail nobody else got at the press conference, and Eddie wanted it high in the story. Let Chuck Boden choke on it.

  Then, some description:

  Lila Street is in the heart of the Acre, the neighborhood home to most of the city’s low-income and working-class immigrants. The street is tightly crammed with triple-decker apartment houses that were once home to mill workers in the city’s days as a nineteenth-century textile power.

  Now, many of the buildings are decrepit, with peeling paint and sagging porches. Yet, most are overfilling with families, many of which came to Lowell from Cambodia in the 1980s in flight after the genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime.

  The language was bumpy, but Eddie had no time to smooth it. In the five minutes he had left, he added the details about the gun, the number of shots fired and the chief’s promise to solve the case.

  Bang. He smashed the send key to file the story.

  “You got it, Gordie,” he yelled across the newsroom.

  Phife flashed thumbs-up and called up the story on his own screen to edit it.

  Eddie leaned back and looked around the newsroom for the first time that day. It was a long, narrow space containing twenty-five beaten metal desks, layered with strata of newsprint, overstuffed manila folders, reams of government documents and empty Chinese food boxes. Eddie’s desk was messier than most. He filed paperwork by the geological method—oldest stuff on the bottom. Nowlin’s desk, the next one over, was neater than most. It held only his computer, a desk blotter with his appointments printed neatly in ink, a foam wrist pad to ease his carpal tunnel syndrome, and a framed picture of his wife, Jesse.

  With the writing deadline for the last edition gone by, the room was quiet. Most of the reporters on the day shift were out meeting sources. A few worked the phones.

  Look at you, right back where you started.

  Eddie picked up his telephone, changed his mind, and slapped it down.

  What are you afraid of? He snatched back the receiver and dialed a Boston number with the eraser end of a pencil.

  A man answered. “Boston Globe, where may I direct your call?”

  “Human resources, Patricia Dannon, please.”

  The phone rang seven times.

  A woman answered, pleasant but rushed. “Ms. Dannon’s office, may I help you?”

  “Yes, yes,” Eddie said, keeping his voice low, yet trying to sound breezy. “Edward Bourque from The Daily Empire in Lowell. Is Ms. Dannon available?”

  She wasn’t. Eddie took a deep breath and plunged on anyway. “I sent Ms. Dannon my resumé and some story clips some time ago, and I haven’t heard from her. I wanted to make sure my material arrived. Perhaps I could make an appointment—”

  The secretary cut him off, icy and efficient. “That won’t be necessary. I’m sure your material is here, Mr. Bourque.” The woman’s voice sweetened. “Please be patient with Ms. Dannon. She’s four weeks behind on her rejection letters.”

  A million hot ants tangoed over Eddie’s face. He thanked her—out of habit, nothing more—and hung up, muttering. “Save the stamp.”

  Across the newsroom, more potential bad news. Franklin Keyes, the paper’s executive editor, was reading Eddie’s story over Phife’s shoulder. Eddie trusted Phife, but Keyes outranked him as second-in-command to the publisher. It was too bad; he wasn’t half the editor Phife was. A good editor is more than a magician with rough news copy, a good editor is a bullshit-stopper who protects reporters from dumb assignments or silly decrees rolling downhill from upper management. Franklin Keyes was a bullshit superconductor. When it hit him, it accelerated.

  Eddie’s phone rang. It was Bruno, his barber, whose shop faced Fire Department headquarters.

  “I just-a saw the dive team scrambling,” he said, the words running together in a thick Italian accent that was a put-on. Bruno was third generation American. He thought an accent was good for business in an immigrant town.

  “You gotta have-a somebody in the shop with you,” Eddie said, mimicking the barber. “Because I know you were-a born in Worcester, and not even the Italian section.”

  Bruno laughed. “You keep the secret, Eddie, or your next flat-top not be so flat.”

  Eddie chuckled and hung up. The dive team rolling usually meant somebody had spotted a floater in the canals. He called the Fire Department. The dispatcher was abrupt, but Eddie got an address out of her. It was just a few blocks from the paper.

  Phife was still tied up with Keyes. Eddie typed him a one-line message about the body in the canal and sent it to him electronically.

  Outside, Eddie walked three blocks to Dunkin’ Donuts. The sidewalk was deserted. There were few footprints in the fresh snow. In summer, Merrimack Street was crowded with businesspeople in suits and shoppers hustling between the boutiques, old men leaning their crooked backs against brick walls and talking conservative politics, and packs of teenaged girls comparing their glitter lipsticks and their babies.

  Eddie bought a large dark roast with cream, and then trudged into the wet sleet toward the Worthen Canal.

  Nineteenth-century Irish immigrants had dug Lowell’s canals to channel the muscle of the Merrimack River to the city’s textile mills. The mill companies had long gone south in search of cheaper labor, but the canals—six miles’ worth—still churned out bodies. Most were heroin addicts with blue skin and sticky white lips puckered in an overdose kiss. Other addicts, stoned stupid and too scared to call 911, dumped the bodies into the canals. They floated with the trash, the brown bubbles and little oil slicks, passing over stolen shopping carts and discarded tires. There was barely a ripple as the canals dragged their dirty cargo around the city like tired blood.

  The Worthen Canal, which passes through some of the city’s roughest neighborhoods, was known to produce a murder victim on occasion. Since it flowed from the outskirts of the city to downtown, it was usually impossible for police to pinpoint where a body had been dumped.

  Diesel exhaust was heavy at the scene. Three cruisers with blues spinning, a fire engine, and an ambulance idled in a semicircle near the edge of the canal. A swelling crowd of scanner junkies had gathered, kept back from the interesting stuff by yellow police tape.

  It seemed a big production for a dead drug addict. Better put Danny on alert. I might need a hand with this one. Eddie paged Nowlin to his cell phone number.

  Eddie didn’t know the uniformed cop working crowd control along the police tape, but that wasn’t usually a problem. The trick was to hold the notebook in plain
sight and act like you were invited.

  “Captain McCabe here yet?” Eddie asked the cop as he ducked under the tape.

  The officer’s whole face squinted, like a guy waking up to a bright light. “He’s back there. Who are you?”

  Eddie walked on. “Edward Bourque, from The Empire. If McCabe comes this way, tell him I got here as fast as I could. Thanks.”

  He didn’t look back.

  Gerald McCabe was a source of Eddie’s. Both used to work the graveyard shift. Eddie would tip off McCabe whenever the patrolmen’s union planted a story in the paper whacking police management. And anytime Eddie missed a late-night car wreck or bar stabbing, McCabe would ring Eddie’s cell phone.

  The captain’s thick frame—an oil drum on cannon legs—stood out among the handful of uniformed officers breathing steam in the winter air and peering into the water. A police photographer clicked photos. A diver in a skin-tight blue suit dropped a rope ladder over the canal’s edge. Another diver crouched ready with a large vinyl sack.

  The stone and concrete canal was about as wide as a city street. It smelled like a wet basement. Water ran through it about five feet below street level. Two weeks of relentless cold had iced the canal at its edges, narrowing the flow of water to a channel down the middle.

  A body lay face down, partially trapped in the ice. It was a man, judging by the gray trench coat. He was maybe five-foot-nine, dressed in dark slacks with black-stocking feet. The left sleeve of his raincoat was torn off at the shoulder, exposing a bare arm, ugly white and bent back the wrong way at the elbow.

  Eddie had seen bodies before—real bodies, like this one, so unlike the illusions in caskets made up by an undertaker. He asked McCabe, “Suicide or overdose?”

  “Neither. The chief’s on his way.”

  The chief didn’t go out in the snow for accidents or for addicts. Eddie gulped the rest of his coffee, wished he had another, and then got to work. He sketched the scene and the position of the body in his notebook, and listed the cops he recognized.

  He scanned for details that would illustrate the story. The closest building was a three-story brick cube, the backside of a hardware store. There were two faces in a second-floor window, probably store employees on a gawk break. In the other window, somebody had taped a red and blue political sign. It read “Re-elect Hippo Vaughn to Congress.” The sign was either a year old, or a year premature. Vaughn had been reelected in a landslide last year, but it reminded Eddie he had promised Phife a campaign analysis on the upcoming city election.

  Above, on the building’s roof, something drew his eye. A silhouette against white sky. He shielded his eyes with the notebook. A woman’s face teased from behind long black hair. She swept the hair back with a red mitten, revealing skin the shade of clear tea. She was young, maybe late twenties, and striking—Cambodian, most likely. Eddie’s eyes lingered on her.

  A yelp echoed off the canal walls.

  “Shit! This is cold,” a diver yelled from the water. “My balls are shrinking to BBs.”

  McCabe bellowed at him. “You don’t need ’em. I wear out your old lady whenever you work a double shift.”

  All the cops chuckled. The diver yelled back, “Small price to pay for overtime.”

  The divers slipped the bag under the body and fed straps up to the cops on the ledge. The uniformed guys pulled up the corpse and set it face-up on the ground. McCabe wrestled his huge hands inside rubber gloves and squatted next to the body in silence for a minute, touching nothing.

  He deadpanned, “Boys, I don’t think this guy’s gonna make it.” Eddie made a note that the body still had a wristwatch, a black sports model, on the left wrist.

  “White male,” McCabe said. “Severe trauma, face and head.”

  That was police understatement. Something had smashed this guy’s nose to pulp. The lower lip was split. The cheeks were beaten to the bone. Maybe he jumped off a building, or stumbled drunk into a passing truck—or maybe this was a homicide.

  Eddie’s little canal story had become page-one news.

  Where the hell are you, Danny?

  He paged Nowlin again.

  McCabe stepped aside to let the police photographer take some more shots. Eddie looked again to the woman on the roof. There was only the sky.

  The photographer finished his work. McCabe stepped back to the body. He ran his hands inside the coat and checked the breast pockets. “No wallet,” he said. He patted the front trouser pockets. Nothing. Suddenly his arm recoiled. “Christ!” he yelled.

  Eddie jumped back on reflex.

  McCabe reached in the coat and yanked out a small black box. “I felt something moving,” he said. “His goddam pager is going off.”

  A breath of Fear chilled Eddie’s neck. He had met Fear—or, more accurately, invented her—when he was ten years old, and his curiosity had gotten him trapped in an abandoned well rumored to have been filled with bones. He had never been more terrified. During that night, his fear took on a personality. It became Fear, a leggy redhead with flaming red nails and lips—part biker-chick, part vampire. At the same time sexy and frightening.

  McCabe wiped a thumb over the pager’s tiny digital screen and frowned. He looked at Eddie. Fear nuzzled up from behind and pressed her icicle tits to Eddie’s back.

  “Hey Ed,” McCabe said. “On this guy’s beeper, ain’t this your number?” He double-checked the digits recorded on the pager. “You want this stiff to call your cell phone?”

  Chapter 2

  There were no tears for Danny Nowlin in the newsroom.

  It’s not that reporters are cold to tragedy, just detached, too consumed with trying to get the story right. Readers are easy to educate, but how do you make them feel? The best tragic stories bring a stranger to life, and then take that life away. Reporters see the production from backstage; they recognize the details that are moving, but can’t afford to be moved by them.

  The newsroom’s stunned silence quickly evolved into action. Everyone on the staff had written tragedies before. They decided that for Nowlin, they would write the best one ever published in The Empire. Several volunteered to cull through Danny’s old stories for excerpts of his work. Copy editors stayed late on their own time to perfect the layout. Everyone on the news staff composed a quote about Danny, to run under a head shot of the author. For his quote, Eddie typed, “He would have won a Pulitzer before his career was over, by creating the kind of journalism that changes our lives. We will never know how great is our loss.”

  The medical examiner confirmed the identification with dental records later that evening, and announced an autopsy for the next day. The cops released precious little news. No official cause of death, no estimated time. Accident? Suicide? Homicide? They wouldn’t speculate for the record.

  Nowlin’s wife was away, visiting her parents in Rhode Island over the weekend. The police said she wasn’t coming back until morning. She told a detective by phone that she had talked to Danny on Friday. She had tried to ring him over the weekend. No answer.

  A dozen reporters stayed late to write the stories and sidebars for the next day’s edition. They wove in Eddie’s details from the scene. Their writing styles, all their voices, blended like a choir.

  Somebody had to do the grunt work—to write the obituary. Eddie volunteered. He had written hundreds of obits in his career, but never for a person he had known.

  The first draft was clumsy. It read forced and too tight. Phife edited out the tension, while keeping the formal obituary format:

  LOWELL—Daniel P. Nowlin, 28, of North Road in Chelmsford, a political reporter for The Daily Empire, died suddenly over the weekend of an undetermined cause. (See story, Page 1.)

  Mr. Nowlin leaves his wife, Jesse; his father, Sean T. Nowlin, of Pelham, N.H.; a sister, Daisy O’Leary, of Lancaster; a stepsister, Mary Reston, of New York City; and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins. He was the son of the late Deborah Ann Nowlin, who died nineteen years
ago.

  Mr. Nowlin also leaves a newspaper staff weakened by his loss, and already missing his counsel.

  He was born in Brandon Village, Ireland, and moved to the United States with his family as an infant. He grew up in Malden, Mass., graduated from Salem State College with a degree in psychology, and then completed graduate studies in print journalism at Boston University.

  After a summer in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as a copy editor on an English language weekly newspaper, Mr. Nowlin became a reporter at the Clinton Voice, and then worked at the Gloucester Guardian-Leader, before accepting a job at The Empire two years ago.

  Mr. Nowlin was a tenacious reporter, who had a reputation for working long hours, sometimes straight through the night, despite his chronic carpal tunnel syndrome.

  Last year, he completed the Boston Marathon in 3:21.55.

  What his loss means to this newspaper, in his production as a reporter, in his attitude and in his dedication, is incalculable.

  The obituary ended with wake and funeral details.

  Gordon Phife was pleased with it. “Reads fine,” he said.

  Eddie didn’t know why he disagreed. “Seems somehow insufficient.”

  “It’s not. It’s what Danny deserves,” he said. “This is not a competition, Ed. Go home, call your aunts, tell them you love them, and go to bed.”

  Phife was right; it was time to go home.

  Eddie steered his sputtering Chevette through the quiet streets of Lowell’s working-class Pawtucketville neighborhood. The car moaned on the uphills but otherwise didn’t mind the work. The Mighty Chevette was twelve years old, and long ago paid for. Pale yellow and spotted with rust, it looked like a giant sneaker made of butter and covered with toast crumbs.

  Had Danny been mugged? Or had he been careless on some icy bridge? Eddie thought about the way Danny used to push him to work harder, and about their unspoken competition for jobs at bigger newspapers. The competition was over. Eddie shivered and turned up the heat.

  He pulled down a street crammed with single-family homes shaped like the houses in the Monopoly game. He parked in front of a gray one with asphalt shingles. Three cement steps led to a bright red door—unlocked, as usual. The people of his mostly Catholic neighborhood worked too hard to squander their souls for the contents of Eddie’s junk drawer, his mismatched silverware, and the handful of medals he had won in high school track and field.