Charm City

Chapter 20

Rosita Ruiz.

The name glared at Tess form the top of buff-colored paper-heavy-weight, expensive stuff. It was in 24-point type, maybe 36, as black and intense as Rosita's eyes. Tess stared back, still trying to figure out what her mystery guest wanted her to find in a collection of clips, mostly sports stories, and this skimpy work history. Rosita's professional life to date could be summed up by grade school in Roxbury, college at Boston University (history major, cum laude), one summer internship at a small Massachusetts paper, another internship at the San Antonio Eagle, and one award, a second-place in the Society of South Texas Journalists. How had this slender résumé landed Rosita a job at one of the country's top twenty newspapers? Tess had had five years when the Star had folded, and she hadn't made the first cut at the Blight.

Well, Ruiz, Tess thought ungenerously. And a female covering sports, to boot. A two-fer in the wonderful world of newspaper affirmative action hires. Not that equally unqualified white guys didn't get jobs all the time. For every underqualified minority or woman, there were at least three white men who were equally inept: that was the true legacy of affirmative action, lowering the standards for everyone. Besides, Rosita's academic credentials were impeccable-assuming they were true.

The registrar at Boston University confirmed Rosita's graduation date and major-once Tess claimed to be a Blight employee fact-checking a résumé. Well, she was, wasn't she?

"One small thing," the woman in the registrar's office said. "She actually was magna cum laude. We don't usually see students make that kind of mistake, but possibly ‘magna' was inadvertently dropped from her résumé."

"Possibly," echoed Tess, unconvinced. It didn't seem in character for Rosita to underreport her accomplishments.

She spread the contents of the envelope across her desk, so she could see everything at once. Perhaps the pieces formed a whole. Was there anything of value here, was there a pattern to what she had been given? No, it appeared someone had grabbed whatever was available, shoved it in this envelope, and stuck it under the windshield wiper on her car. It was up to her to figure out where to go from here. Was she being challenged by someone who, like Whitney and Tyner, was trying to push her forward? That would suggest Jack Sterling. Or was the envelope from someone lazy and desperate, who hoped Tess could find something where they could not? Any of the other editors might fit that description.

She read Rosita's clips for the second time. One mystery was solved: here was the breathless hyperbole, the creaky clichés that had invaded Feeney's work once the two were paired. Funny, she had been paired in San Antonio, too, and had included one of those clippings. By Rosita Ruiz and Alann J. Shepard. It was the only Page One clipping in the batch, one of those blow-by-blow Sunday stories that told you more than you ever wanted to know about a recent controversy, but didn't really tell you anything new. A pro baseball player who had gone straight from the San Antonio barrio to the Texas Rangers had propositioned an under-cover policewoman posing as a prostitute on one of his trips home. "How about a little half-and-half?" he had asked her. If only he had stopped there, he could have argued persuasively he really was looking for cream in his coffee. Alas, the police wire tap had preserved his next statement as well. "I'll pay you forty bucks." Not even convenience stores charged that much for half-and-half.

Still, it was a petty offense, the kind of rap a popular athlete or actor routinely survived after the ritual round of media mea culpas. But the officer was white and the baseball player Latino, and that had changed the dynamic. The department had been accused of a racist conspiracy against the ball player, of trying to entrap him specifically in order to tear him down. Yet the baseball player's own mother seemed to believe the cops' version of events. "Men!" she had told the reporters in Spanish. "What do you expect? They can't keep it in their pants. He plays better when he's happy, that's a fact."

An interview in Spanish? Rosita had probably conducted it. On a hunch, Tess dialed the San Antonio Eagle again, and was transferred only twice before she reached Rosita's erstwhile partner.

"A.J. here."

"As in Alann Shepard?"

"No astronaut jokes, okay? I've heard them all in my time."

"I'm Tess Monaghan at the Baltimore Beacon-Light and I'm doing a background check on Rosita Ruiz."

If his face matched his voice, it must have the world's largest smirk on it. "What has she stepped into now?"

The Lone Star version of Feeney. Tess found herself warming to him, then remembered she was on less than wonderful terms with the real thing.

"Nothing that I know of. This is purely routine. I'm curious about your experience working with her."

"A ‘purely routine' background check six months after she arrives at the paper and less than two weeks after she has her first big story? I'll buy that. If history repeats itself, she'll use that story to jump to yet another paper, and leave the Beacon-Light to clean up behind her. Let's hope the Boston Globe or the Washington Post is smart enough to ask these questions before she signs on the dotted line."

"I talked to Ed Saldivar, but he wouldn't do anything other than confirm her dates of employment."

"Boy, you guys up there really are resourceful. You get a no comment and you stop digging. To think I was envious when Rosita moved on."

"I'm talking to you now," Tess said pointedly. "Obviously I haven't stopped digging. And you obviously have something you're longing to tell me, so why not get to it?"

There was a long pause. When he spoke again, the smarmy tone was gone and his voice was quieter, sadder.

"There's a lot I want to tell you. I want to tell you about invasion-of-privacy lawsuits, which can be as troublesome as libel suits any day. I want to tell you about big-eyed little girls who go up to barely literate Mexican women and say, ‘Oh, I know you're not talking to reporters, but may I come in for a glass of iced tea? It's such a hot day.' I want to tell you the way gossip works in the newspaper world-no one in Texas will touch Rosita, but some Eastern newspapers don't have any contacts here, so they don't know the whole story. I want to tell you that when a newspaper pays someone off for the crimes that appear under a double byline, the blameless partner never gets exonerated. I want to tell you all these things, but the out-of-court settlement came with a gag order, and I could lose my job for what I've already not said."

"Can't you tell me anything more? A few details, or some names?"

"Look, re-report the stories she's done for you. Talk to the people she interviewed, look at any document she used, trace her steps. My hunch is you'll find so much up in Baltimore, you won't need to worry about what happened here." A slight pause. "It's old news, anyway."

Tess heard a voice screaming at him in the background. "Hey, Earth to A.J. You got another call, can you take it, or should I have him orbit until you re-enter?"

"I'm getting off," A.J. said wearily.

"May I call you back?" Tess asked.

"Call me back? Lady, I've never heard of you."

Re-report Rosita's story. Without intending to, Tess had been doing that all along. She had spoken to the two Mrs. Winks, quizzed Feeney on what Rosita had contributed to the original story. She had studied the case files on the Wynkowski divorce, looked for police records that would confirm the domestic violence. In her bragging, Rosita had even provided a handy checklist of everything she had done, and Feeney had backed her up. Feeney got the financial stuff, but I got the stuff about his marriage and his gambling problem. If you listen to what people are talking about around town, it's my part of the story.

Tess drew a line down the center of a legal pad and created two categories-matrimony and betting. Lea had sworn Wink wasn't a gambler, but wives didn't know everything. She then called up the archived electronic copy of that notorious first story, preparing to jot down the names of Rosita's sources and call them back.

No wonder Jack and Lionel had been troubled: there wasn't a single person speaking for attribution in the entire piece, unless the information was so innocuous as to be meaningless. ("‘Everybody loves Wink,' said longtime friend Paul "Tooch" Tucci. ‘Even when they lose to him, they love him.'") At least Feeney had a trail of court papers to buttress his claim Wink wasn't liquid; Rosita had a friend close to Wink, or someone close to the couple. It would be impossible to double-check any of this. Which was probably the point. Rosita had learned at least one thing since leaving San Antonio: how to cover her tracks.

She read the story again, hoping for a lead to follow, anything. Here was the detail about Wink and Linda's bungalow in Violetville, the neighborhood that Jack Sterling had found such an incongruous place for a tough guy. "The wood-frame bungalow on MacTavish looked like the archetypal honeymooners' cottage from the outside, with its new plantings and fresh paint. But a source close to the couple said the honeymoon was over from almost the day the two crossed the threshold, as Wynkowski repeatedly battered his new bride."

The Blight had thoughtfully provided Tess with a city crisscross. Finally, a break. Half the residents on MacTavish, barely two blocks in length, had lived there when Wink and Linda were keeping house, according to the listings. The neighbors probably knew as much about the couple's marriage as anyone, Tess figured. Wood-frame bungalows, with their thin walls, were notoriously bad at keeping secrets.