The Darkness

10

When we arrived back at the Gazette, I followed Jack to his desk. Yet as we rounded the corner, I saw Tony Valentine approaching. When Tony saw me his face lit up.

Actually I couldn’t tell if his face lit up, considering there was enough self-tanner on there to make George Hamilton look pale, and his face was pumped with enough Botox to iron out a shar-pei. But he did have a big smile on his face, and his gait picked up when he saw me coming.

“Henry!” Tony exclaimed, jogging up and placing his arm around me. “I’ve been looking for you. Where’ve you been all morning?”

“Chasing a story,” I said. “Tony, have you met Jack

O’Donnell?”

Tony shook his head, but took Jack’s hand and did a neat little bow. “Not yet, but your reputation precedes you, Mr. O’Donnell. It’s a pleasure.”

“Pleasure’s all mine, Mr. Valentine,” Jack replied. His tone surprised me. As a hard news man, I didn’t think Jack would have much use for Tony Valentine. Tony had recently been brought on board at the Gazette to kickstart the paper’s flailing gossip pages, which had grown stale with coverage that revolved mainly around celebrities who stopped being famous before I was born. Tony was one of the top names in the gossip field-if you could call it that-and already his columns were among the most e-mailed on the Gazette Web site. He dressed like he was auditioning to be James Bond on a daily basis, and smiled like he was being paid to. We had nothing in common other than our employer, and I preferred to keep it that way.

“Henry,” Tony said. “Glad we ran into each other. Do

I have an offer for you!”

“I already have life insurance,” I said.

Valentine laughed. “That’s a good one. Seriously now, have you heard of Belinda Burke?”

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Sounds familiar,” I said, “but I’m not sure why.”

“Belinda was a contestant on Marry My Mother-in- law. She won a million bucks by setting her mother-inlaw up with the dentist who walked from Dallas to

Newark stark naked.”

“Oh, yeah. Right. Match made in heaven.”

“Well, Belinda has quite a story to tell. So naturally she’s decided to write a memoir.”

“That’s nice. Literature was getting a bit stale.”

“I totally agree! Anyway, she was going to use this ghostwriter named Flak. Just one word, like Madonna. He ghostwrote Joe the Plumber’s autobiography, did a wonderful job. Anyway, Flak came down with syphilis and I thought you might want to give it a crack. I know Belinda’s agent and could get you two a meeting, no problem.”

“Um…why would I want to ghostwrite the memoir of a D-list celebrity nobody’s going to remember in twelve months?”

“Because there’s fifty grand in it for you if you can deliver a manuscript in a month.”

“Somebody thinks she’s worth fifty grand?”

“Oh, heck no. She got a million bucks for the book.

You get fifty k just to write it.”

“She can’t write it herself?”

Valentine laughed, deep and hearty. “Henry, I don’t think the woman can read. But that’s not the point. Her publisher is a little worried Belinda might have a short shelf life, and they want to get the book out before the next season of American Idol takes attention away from her.”

“The money sounds great, but I’m just not really into that kind of thing. I never saw myself as that kind of writer.” I looked at Tony. “Just out of curiosity, why come to me? What’s in this for you?”

Tony grew a sly smirk. His eyes narrowed. I could tell

Tony Valentine was far more calculating than he let on.

“See, I knew you were a smart one. Here’s the deal,

Henry. If you take this job, you get the money. That’s how you win. If Belinda publishes the book, she adds a few ticks on to her fifteen minutes. She wins. And because I got you the job and we work at the same paper, you feed me exclusive info from the book that I can run in my column. I win. We all win, Parker.”

“Wow,” I said. “It’s like a whole big circle of ethics violations.”

“Say what you will, but who loses here?”

“Sorry, Tony. I have to say no.”

“No apologies necessary,” Tony said, taking a hair pick from his suit jacket and running it through his glistening hair. That was a first. “But I hope you understand why I put it on the table.”

“I do. I appreciate you looking out for me. And

Belinda. And you,” I said. “If you know anyone who wants me to test canned food for botulism, my Friday night is free.”

“See, that rapier wit. One more thing I love about you,

Henry. See you around. And it was nice to meet you, Mr.

O’Donnell.” Tony walked away, whistling a tune I couldn’t identify but was definitely Sondheim.

“Have a good one,” Jack said as Valentine rounded the corner.

“Have a good one?” I said to Jack. “It took you a month just to give me the time of day.”

“You should be nicer to him,” Jack said.

“You can’t be serious,” I replied. “Jack, he’s a gossip hound. A bottom feeder. He makes a living shoveling garbage.”

“And he’s necessary for the survival of this newspaper,” Jack said abrasively. “You can ride your high horse until it dies of thirst, but this is not a business that’s growing, in case you haven’t noticed. We didn’t have a real gossip columnist for years. Now, people are talking about Tony. Besides, what do you think a newspaper is?

Every day, we print a hundred pages, give or take, and reach over a million readers. You think every one of them wants to read about crime and corruption? Some of them need cheddar-flavored potato chips in their daily routine.

Something you know is crap but you enjoy it anyway. You like steak, Henry?”

“Yeah, why?”

“How do you like your cut-lean and tough, or a little more flavorful?”

“More flavor, I guess. Why?”

“You know what puts the flavor in steak? Fat. Too much fat, in case you don’t keep up on healthy trends, is bad for you. But it makes the steak taste like a slice of heaven. That’s what gossip is. It’s fat. Without it, the paper is leaner, tougher, but doesn’t have as much flavor.

Maybe it’s the kind of flavor that increases your cholesterol or hardens your arteries, but most people live in the moment. You get what I’m saying, sport?”

“I get it,” I said. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“You like your job, don’t you?” I nodded. “Then live with it. You do your job the best you can, don’t worry about everyone else.”

“But don’t you think, you know, that the Gazette should have a higher standard? You’ve been here, what, thirty years?”

“What do you think the Gazette is?” Jack said with a laugh. “Our job is to report the news for the paper. It’s not the news’s job to get to us. This company is the sum of what we make of it. Now, if you want to work for a company that only reports what you want, go start a blog.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t have to like it.”

“Like it, hate it. It ain’t changing,” Jack said. “Now here’s the deal. I want you to call Brett Kaiser.”

“Why me?”

“I’ve heard of his firm before. They handle civil litigation, among other things, including libel. Which means they know a lot about newspapers, which means, no offense, kiddo, he’ll be a little less threatened by a-how should I put this?-wet-behind-the-ears guy like you.”

“I’m not that wet behind the ears,” I replied.

“Come on, Henry. What was it, a year ago that you could finally rent a car without paying extra fees?”

Rather than argue (and lose), I just nodded. We went to my desk, Jack perching on the corner while I picked up the phone. I dialed the number for Kaiser, Hirschtritt and Certilman from the paper Talcott gave us. A woman picked up on the first ring.

“Kaiser, Hirschtritt and Certilman, how may I direct your call?”

“Hi, I’d like to speak with Brett Kaiser.”

“And who may I ask is calling?”

I looked at Jack, knowing where this was about to go.

“My name is Henry Parker. I’m with the New York

Gazette. ”

“Hold on,” she said, wariness in her voice. “I’ll put you through.”

The next thing I heard was a dial tone. I placed the receiver down.

“You got hung up on,” Jack correctly surmised. I nodded. “Go home.”

“What?”

“It’s been a long day. Get some rest. We’re going to be working like dogs over the next few days, and I don’t need you conking out on me.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve got almost fifty years on you.”

“True, but while you were smoking from atomic bongs and doing keg stands in college, I was chasing leads. Get some rest, Parker. I’ll see you here tomorrow. Nine o’clock.”

“I’ll see you at eight,” I said.

A smell greeted me in the apartment that I did not immediately recognize. It resembled some sort of meat, maybe chicken or fish, something sweet and citrusy-all mixed with the tangy smell of something burning.

Making my way through the pungent stench to the kitchen, I found the oven on and some sort of concoction roiling and baking inside that, from the look of the sauce coating the insides of the appliance, didn’t seem to be enjoying it. As I got closer, a small bit of smoke escaped the oven, so I quickly shut the device off.

“Amanda?” I yelled. “Are you here?”

There was no answer, so I tried again.

“Amanda?”

I heard a squeak as the bathroom door opened. The shower was still running, and I could see Amanda’s wet head poking from behind the curtain. Her hair was filled with shampoo and her eyes looked at me through a haze of steam.

“Henry?”

“Amanda, what the hell are you doing?”

“Bowling. What does it look like I’m doing?”

“You’re aware that this apartment was about thirty seconds from being on the eleven o’clock news.”

“What?” she said, wiping suds from her face.

“I saved your mystery meat dish just in time before it burned down the neighborhood.”

“No way. The timer was supposed to go off after half an hour. I didn’t hear anything.”

“You are in the shower, you know.”

“No way. I have a keen sense of hearing.”

“When you pressed half an hour,” I said, “what exact buttons did you press?”

“I held the button until it read three zero minutes and zero seconds.”

“Really,” I said. “You’re sure about that?”

“Sure. Why?”

“There’s no seconds on the oven. It’s just minutes and hours. You set the timer for three hours and zero minutes.”

“Oh. Crap. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just…never cook again. And apologize to the fish in there.”

“It was supposed to be orange chicken,” she said.

“Well it’s probably got the texture of volcanic rock right now. You feel like pizza?”

She offered a sheepish grin, and said, “Let me finish up in here and we’ll order.”

“Sure you don’t want me to join you?”

“No, the toaster is on, too. Would you mind checking on it?”

“The toaster? Are you ser…”

“Just kidding. Give me five minutes.”

She closed the door and I collapsed on the couch. I turned on the television and clicked through a hundred and fourteen channels before deciding that there was nothing worth watching. It was just as entertaining to sit there and go through the events of the day, and prepare for the next.

Hopefully Brett Kaiser could fill in much of the information that was missing. Somebody had to be paying

Kaiser’s firm’s share of the lease money, and with any luck that person would have intimate knowledge of just who my brother was working for and why he was killed. I still didn’t buy that it was totally a power play.

Stephen came to me because he was scared of something. If you work in a company and have problems with underlings, there are ways to circumvent any actions. Now when somebody above you wants you gone, that’s when you have a problem. If you feel that your termination-pardon the term-is inevitable, you begin planning an exit strategy. In the workplace, maybe you look for another job, prepare a lawsuit, something so that you’re not thrown from an airplane without a parachute. When Stephen came to me that night, scared out of his mind (a mind already addled), he was looking for his exit strategy. Granted the actions you take are a little different when you led a life of crime as opposed to life in a cubicle, but the principle still stood.

What I needed to know was who set Stephen on the path to his eventual exit. Even though he didn’t make it, he had something to say. A story to tell.

Amanda came out of the shower. She was wrapped in a towel, and over the towel she wore a pink bathrobe.

Above this contraption she was tousling her hair with another towel. The combination of towels and thick bathrobe made Amanda look about twice as thick as she normally did, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

“This is my routine,” she said. “You should be used to it by now.”

“I am,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean you don’t look a little silly.”

She took a seat on the couch, wrapping the towel into a turban where it sat perched a whole foot above her head.

I’d bought the couch at an apartment sale for about a third of what it would cost at a department store. It was brown leather, with big cushions that I constantly rotated to change up the stains. Made me feel like it was a little less worn.

“How was your day?” she asked, absently flipping through the stack of the day’s newspapers I kept on the coffee table.

“Still working on this story with Jack,” I said. “It’s interesting, working with him for the first time.”

“In what way?”

“Jack was in pretty bad shape my first few years at the

Gazette. I hate to admit it, but there was a moment or two when I wondered if this was really the same guy I grew up wanting to be. Not many kids dress up like a journal-88

Jason Pinter ist for Halloween. It was important to me that he was who

I thought he was.”

“You did not dress like a journalist,” Amanda said.

“You bet your ass. Had a row of pens in my shirt pocket, a camera and notepad and everything. Everyone assumed I was Clark Kent.”

“I would have paid to see that,” Amanda said.

“There aren’t a whole lot of photo albums back in

Bend. My dad wasn’t exactly the sentimental type.”

“How do you feel about how things are going?” she asked. I took a seat next to her, thought for a moment.

“When I found out Stephen was dead, I felt numb. Like someone was prodding me with a stick I could see but couldn’t feel. I was supposed to feel remorse, but it didn’t come at first. Someone can tell you that you lost a family member, but if you didn’t even know the person it’s not the same. It should be, I guess. Blood is blood, but in a way it isn’t. Now, it feels different. Like maybe I did lose someone who could have- should have -been closer to me.” I looked at Amanda, saw she was listening to every word. “Without you, I’d have no one.”

“Don’t say that,” she said, looking away. “That’s not true.”

It was true, but I didn’t want to argue. I’d made mistakes during our time together. Knowing when to shut up was an important lesson.

She went back to reading the paper. Her fingers were still a little wet, and I could see the print rubbing off on them. She went to wipe her hands on the towel, then smiled and thought better of it.

“You see this?” she said, holding up a copy of that morning’s Dispatch.

I shook my head. I rarely read the Dispatch. Not because I held a grudge against them-though I did-it’s because they never had much I felt was worth reading. It was the kind of paper that rarely presented an even story.

It was all about eliciting a reaction, stoking a fire, presenting a story so biased in one direction or the other that readers would either be incensed or infatuated. I had all the major New York City papers delivered to my door in one bundle. I could care less about the Dispatch, but it didn’t cost anything more and every now and then I enjoyed reading the sports section.

“I must have missed it,” I said. “What’d you see?”

“Paulina Cole,” Amanda said. “Says here her column will be suspended until Thursday while she deals with a personal matter.”

“Really?” I asked. That surprised me. Paulina Cole was the kind of woman who didn’t take personal leaves.

If my mental image of her was accurate, she stayed in her office while darkness crept in, waiting for some scoop to brighten her desk. And if she didn’t get one, it would only fuel her fire to make the next scoop even juicier.

I wondered what could be so important that she’d suspend her reporting, even just for a few days. It would take either an act of nature or a revolt by the paper’s shareholders to get rid of Paulina. Which meant somewhere a storm was brewing. Not to mention I’d be lying if I didn’t hope, after everything she’d done to Jack and me, that it made her life a living hell.

No doubt Paulina would come back on Thursday with a story that would open some eyes.