The Girl Next Door

CHAPTER 4

There are places where a reporter can enter into the rather delicate discussion of whether his publisher is, in fact, a murderer. But the middle of the newsroom is not noted for being one of them. I had colleagues on every side of me, and while reporters are accustomed to hearing one side of some strange interviews-most of which they knew to ignore-I might attract a little too much attention if I started hollering questions like, “You really think Gary Jackman killed someone?”

So I started making for the first unoccupied glass office I saw while trying to ignore the pounding in my chest.

“Hang on a second, I got too many ears around,” I said, walking in and closing the door behind me. “Okay, I’m in a spot where no one is listening. You’re going to have to give this to me again.”

“I know, I know, it’s crazy,” Jim said, talking faster than I had ever heard him before. “But I was with him the night before Nancy was killed.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, you may not know it, but Gary likes to tie one on now and then, and I don’t mind knocking back a few myself. So we went to a bar to do a little away-from-the-table negotiating. Sometimes you get a lot more done with a drink in your hand than you do sitting in a conference room, you know?”

“Right, of course.”

Outside the door, Lester Palenski-our bikini-obsessed photo editor-stopped and looked at me curiously, sitting in an office that wasn’t my own. He seemed perturbed, mouthed the words “I need to talk to you” and held up a printout of a picture. I flashed him a thumbs-up, then pointed to my phone. He frowned and moved on.

“And … look, you can’t tell anyone about this,” Jim continued. “I could get in deep water with the membership, negotiating on my own like this. They’d skin me alive. I’m just telling you this because you’re a good enough reporter, you’d probably figure out it was Jackman sooner or later. I’m just helping you along, you know?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, inhaling and exhaling loudly. “So, anyway, I had suggested we meet at this bar for a friendly get-to-know-you drink. But he and I both knew what I really meant was I wanted to be able to talk without all the lawyers around. You can make more headway in thirty minutes without the lawyers around than you can in thirty days with ’em, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So it’s just him and me at this bar, and we’re kind of getting into it. We’d both had a few-more than a few, maybe-and he was getting kind of pissed off. Some guys are like that when they drink.”

And, I wanted to add, some guys throw up on the gentleman next to them at the symphony. But I just said, “Yeah, sure.”

“So Jackman keeps pushing and pushing, saying we should just give in. And I … I feel really awful about this, given what happened … but I kept using Nancy as, like, I don’t know, a block or something, like I was good cop and she was bad cop. Because he knew she had been a hardliner. So he’d say, ‘We could maybe go for a thirty percent cut.’ And I’d think about it and say, ‘I don’t think Nancy would go for that.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, what about a rolling cut, ten percent this year, ten percent next, ease people into it?’ And I’d think about it some more, pretend to really be wanting to do it, and then say, ‘I’m not sure Nancy would like that.’”

“Had Nancy told you she wouldn’t cave, no matter what?”

Jim hefted another sigh.

“Well, she had and she hadn’t,” he said. “I was really just winging it, trying to tweak him. Sometimes negotiations are like that. You got to get under a guy’s skin. In the end, we probably had to give in a little. I just didn’t want to have to give in a lot. I feel so bad about what happened. I never knew he really meant it when he was making all those threats.”

“Threats?”

“Oh, well, I kept telling him Nancy wouldn’t go for this, Nancy wouldn’t go for that, and it really got him going. Suddenly he was saying things like, ‘I can handle Nancy Marino. I’m not going to let Nancy Marino get in my way.’ I thought he was just blowing off some steam. I had no idea.”

“So it got personal,” I said.

“Oh yeah. Big-time. Real personal. There was this vibe to it like he was big Gary Jackman and she was just little Nancy Marino and how dare she get in his way. You can imagine a guy like Jackman is making, what, five hundred, six hundred grand a year? Maybe more. And here some papergirl making eighteen bucks an hour is telling him where he can get off? He just wasn’t having it.”

Lester wandered past again and squared to look at me, emphasizing his impatience by waving the photo at me. I gave him a palms-up, nothing-I-can-do gesture. He shot me a dirty look and stalked off.

“So how did you guys leave it?” I asked.

“We didn’t. He just stormed out.”

“What bar were you at?” I asked. I was thinking about how I was going to get this on the record in some way. If they were having that loud an argument, there would have been a bartender who heard it.

“I … Look, I can’t say,” Jim said, having already guessed my intentions. “I can’t have you charging in there and asking questions. I’m known there. I go there a lot and so do some of my members. Word’ll get out.”

“Okay, so think like a journalist for a second, Jim. You know I can’t just run with a single off-the-record source on something like this. This is my smoking gun, but I need more than just one person seeing the smoke. How am I supposed to prove this without a little help?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just sort of hoped if I put you on the right track, you’d be able to figure it out.”

I plunked my elbow on the desk in front of me and rested my chin in my palm. It was a lot to absorb, and I had a thousand questions, the first of which was:

“Why not take this to the police, Jim?”

“Look, I’d like to, and I thought about it. But I just can’t. Think about it from my angle. I’m locked in a tense negotiation with this guy right now. Just say it turns out Jackman didn’t have anything to do with it, that he just happened to get ticked at Nancy the night before she had an accident. The cops might decide I was out to frame the guy and hit me with charges of making a false statement or something. Or Jackman could sue me personally, say I was slandering him to get some leverage. It could wreck our whole negotiation, one; and, two, the union board would fire me for screwing it up. I can’t risk getting involved when the whole thing could just be one big coincidence.”

It wasn’t a coincidence, of course. Nancy Marino really was murdered. I knew that for certain. Jim McNabb didn’t, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him. Not yet.

The fact was, McNabb had reasons to want Jackman to be the killer. And a source with an agenda like that had to be handled carefully. If all these circumstantial pieces pointing toward Jackman turned out to be true, it would be an epic scandal. Jackman would be fired immediately, of course, and the paper’s owners would appoint an interim publisher while they tried to find a replacement, which could take months. Then the new publisher would come in and take a few more months to figure out which way was up. In the meantime, IFIW-Local 117 would skate along with its current contract in place and no one would be bothering to press for pay cuts.

Plus, I’m pretty sure killing a shop steward qualified as an unfair labor practice. There might be ramifications there that would further help the union. So I would definitely be aiding Jim’s cause.

But I’d also be bringing a murderer to justice and breaking a career story, both of which felt like fairly noble goals. Was Jackman really the guy? Was a man who once went after someone with a seven-iron capable of something even more brutal?

I took a deep breath and said:

“Okay, Jim. I’ll do some digging.”

* * *

Emerging from my borrowed office, I shot a quick glance in the direction of Lunky, who seemed to be concentrating on his story and not, I hoped, daydreaming about the fishing on Walden Pond. Judging him momentarily innocuous-not a harm to either himself or others-I decided I had a few spare moments to start some of the aforementioned digging. Not enough to require a backhoe or anything. Just a little garden trowel would do fine.

I took the elevator to the third floor. It was not normally a place in the building I had any need to go, and I didn’t know anyone up there-the whole separation of church and state thing-but I knew that was where Jackass wasted space alongside his harem of secretaries. It being nearly six o’clock, I thought they would all be gone for the day, allowing me to pry into his stuff without interference.

Instead, when I rounded the last corner, I was startled to discover one of the three desks in the secretarial pool still occupied. They must have staggered their shifts so one was on duty both before and after regular business hours.

I almost turned away, thinking I would come back later when all three of them would be gone. Then I noticed Jackman’s door was closed and his office was dark. He had gone home. It was just the third secretary, a cute-if-somewhat-chunky brunette who probably spent a few too many Saturday nights at home with her Netflix account. There was always the chance she might be chatty.

“Hi,” I said, then spied her nameplate and added, “Courtney,” before it sounded like too much of a stretch.

Courtney’s attention had been fixed on a piece of paper on her desk, and she looked up at me with utter bewilderment, like I had walked down the hallway with a giant bird of prey perched on my head. Seeking to set her at ease and perhaps build some rapport, I rewarded her with a winsome smile (because my mother tells me it’s quite charming), fixed my blue eyes on hers (because my mother tells me I have nice eyes), and tried to look cute (because my mother thinks I’m cute).

And maybe it would have worked if Courtney really was my mother. Instead, she struck a businesslike tone and said, “Hi, can I help you?”

I laughed for no reason.

“That’s so funny,” I said. “I was just about to ask you if you could help me. And then you asked me the same question. That’s wild! Do you have ESP or something?”

Courtney looked at me like the bird on top of my head was now talking to her. And she still wasn’t buying … well, anything.

“No,” she said.

“No? No psychics in the family?”

“No.”

“Palm readers? Fortune tellers? Tarot card specialists?”

“No,” she said again, more firmly this time.

“Oh well, I just thought that maybe…”

My voice trailed off. I was the comedian whose act was totally dying. Courtney was getting even less amused by the second.

“Did you need something?” she asked.

Time to take a stab.

“Yeah, I … uhh … I’m told Mr. Jackman gave a very important speech last Thursday night and I’ve been asked to get a … a video of it. You know, put it on YouTube, tweet it, Facebook it, hope it goes viral, that kind of thing. So I just need to know where he was last Thursday night. I think it might have been the, uh, Morristown Rotary Club, but the person who told me wasn’t sure. Would you mind checking his schedule to see where he was that night?”

I said I’d take a stab. I didn’t say it would be a good one. I was uncertain whether Morristown even had a Rotary Club. And even if it did, I wasn’t sure if Rotarians met at night. Courtney was eyeing me like the bird on my head was now warbling Queen’s classic rock anthem “Bicycle Race.”

“Ah, okay.” Courtney glanced down at her desk. “Mr. Jackman has us keep his appointment book by hand-he doesn’t like using the computer. Let me just look for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, beginning to understand why he needed three secretaries.

“I was just about to leave, so I locked the drawer, hang on,” she said, standing up and crossing the secretarial pod toward a small metal lockbox atop a filing cabinet. She worked the dials to the proper position, pulled out a round desk key, returned to her chair and started opening the drawer. I was almost at pay dirt when, as an afterthought, she said, “And, I’m sorry … who needs this video again?”

I didn’t want Jackman to have any way of knowing I was snooping around his office, so I said, “Ted from accounting.”

“Who’s Ted from accounting?”

“I am.”

She jerked her head up from her desk drawer. “No you’re not,” she said. “You’re Carter Ross. I saw you on TV that one time.”

I had made an unscheduled and unfortunate appearance on all the local networks a few years back. It had so thoroughly haunted me the first time around it didn’t seem fair it was now haunting me in reruns.

“Ha ha,” I said. “Yeah, that was … hoo … you remember that, huh?”

Courtney was now appraising me as if the bird had stopped singing and simply loosened its bowels on my face. Yet just when I thought things were going quite poorly enough, they got worse: Gary Jackman walked out of his office. He hadn’t gone home, after all. He was just working with the lights off.

Looking at him as a potential murderer for the first time, I had to admit there was a certain fit to it. Who else would have benefited more from the death of an uncompromising shop steward than the man locked in a stalemate with her union? And who would have had access to the addresses on her paper route and known when she’d be delivering? All signs continued to point to Jackman.

Meanwhile, he was regarding me with his usual mild disgust.

“Are you here for that interview about, I’m sorry, what was her name?” he asked.

So that’s how he was going to play it: like he couldn’t even remember the name of the woman he had killed.

“Nancy Marino,” I prompted, and watched him carefully to see if the mention of her would change something in him. But he was far too cool for that.

“Right, right. Nancy Marino,” he said. “I really don’t have time right now. But maybe Courtney can schedule you for first thing tomorrow?”

“Why, does it make you uncomfortable talking about her?” I challenged him, trying to give him a good stare down, only to be interrupted by Courtney.

“He told me his name was Ted and he was from accounting,” she said.

Jackman tilted his head. “Is that true? Why would you do that?” he demanded.

I was so intent on staring down Jackman it took me a moment to realize I had been totally and completely busted. It was time to sound the retreat. This wasn’t the right moment to confront Jackman anyway, not when I still had so many gaps in my story. So I started backtracking as best I could.

“Yeah, uh … Ted,” I said, forcing out a laugh. “Just a little reporter’s humor for you.”

Jackman pursed his thin lips, crossed his arms, and looked at me condescendingly-a well-practiced posture for him.

“But how would that be funny, a reporter misrepresenting himself?” he asked. “I would call that unethical, not funny.”

Oh great, the man who wouldn’t know an inverted pyramid lede from an inverted nipple was suddenly a journalism expert.

“Yeah, I … uhh…” I said, groping for something that felt like an emergency exit. “Look, to be honest, I was just trying to hit on Courtney here, and I thought if I made her laugh, it would help my cause.”

I turned to Courtney and said, “I’m sorry. I’m such a clod. Please accept my apology.”

I expected Courtney might send a paperweight flying in the direction of the bird on my head. Instead, her face flushed and she looked down at the translucent floor mat under her chair.

“Oh, that’s … that’s okay, really,” she stammered. “Maybe we could … grab some coffee sometime.”

Jackman looked distinctly uncomfortable, like he had come to the television studio to be a guest on Hardball with Chris Matthews and stumbled onto the set of The Dating Game with Chuck Woolery by mistake. My previously wounded male ego experienced a moment of pure triumph-Mom was right after all! — then I decided to make my getaway while the situation was at the peak of confusion.

“That would be great,” I said. “Anyhow, I’ll just be moving on now.”

I turned and walked briskly away before either of them had a chance to comprehend the strangeness of it all.

* * *

Back on the second floor, I made it off the elevator about five steps when I was accosted by Lester Palenski, who was waving a photo printout above his head. In addition to his fondness for bikinis, Lester was known to run a little hot. If one of his photographers failed to get the shot he needed-and it happens to even the best photographers on occasion-Lester took it personally, as if everyone was conspiring to thwart him.

“There you are!” he seethed. “You want to explain this to me?”

Lester handed me the piece of paper he had been brandishing. It was a picture of Lunky, our hulking intern, with his arms wrapped around a bear, which appeared to be dead. It had this vaguely Paleolithic feel about it-Lunky, with his latter-day Neanderthal eyebrow ridge and bushy hair, lugging his kill with him, wearing a goofy grin all the while.

“Brodie wants this story for A1,” Lester said. “But this is the only picture I have of that damn bear.”

And, of course, our newspaper couldn’t very well run a picture of its own intern, especially when he was engaged in an act that didn’t look much like journalism.

“My shooter told me the scene was roped off and the animal control truck was blocking his view. So this was all he could get,” Lester said.

I looked at the photo some more, because I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. It was our bear, all right, all two hundred pounds of it. Yet Lunky had the thing cradled in his arms like a massive, furry infant, and appeared not to be exerting himself at all as he carried it.

“I see” is all I could say, still staring at the printout.

“Your intern ruined my picture,” Lester said, spicing the accusation with a pair of unrepeatable adjectives before the words “intern” and “picture.”

“I, uh, wow,” I replied.

The veins on either side of Lester’s neck were starting to bulge. “A bear wanders into Newark for the first time since the dawn of industrialization and your intern ends up carrying it. You want to explain that to me?”

I couldn’t, of course. When I left, that stupid bear was fifteen feet up a tree, and it looked like it would take a cherry picker to get him out. I couldn’t begin to fathom the circumstances that would have ended with Lunky cradling the thing in his arms. But I would have to figure it out, and fast. Lester had likely lodged his complaint with everyone in the newsroom-everyone who had functioning eardrums, anyway-and as the adult assigned to babysit Lunky this afternoon, I would be expected to account for what happened. I started inching my way around Lester, who was standing between me and any hope I had of mitigating this disaster.

“I’m, uh, going to have to, uh … I have to take a leak,” I began, then, as soon as I had clearance, elongated my strides. “I’ll get back to you, Lester.”

I could sense Lester was gathering himself to begin some serious caterwauling, but I scooted away before he could gain too much volume. I made a straight line for Lunky, who was seated in the intern pod, happily typing away. He dwarfed everything in his workstation-the chair was made for someone roughly half his size-yet he seemed quite content, unaware of the calamity he had caused.

“Hi, Kevin,” I said, gently. “How are things going?”

He looked up from his screen and studied me with his usual detached, academic manner.

“Oh, hello, Mister Ross,” he said, and before I could correct him on the “Mister” part, he added, “I’m doing real well with the first draft.”

Apparently, no one had explained to him that in this business, all we get is a first draft.

“That’s great,” I said, then slid the photo onto the desk so he could look at it. “You, uhh … want to tell me about this?”

I thought I’d get an apology, or at least an embarrassed explanation. Instead, he smiled at it. “Oh, cool picture! Can I keep it?”

“Kevin, you … uhh … you picked up the bear,” I said, as if the problem with this should be self-evident.

But Lunky didn’t get it. “It’s okay, he wasn’t that heavy. It was basically like doing a power clean, and I can power-clean a lot more than that.”

I wanted to be mad at him but somehow couldn’t summon the anger. It would be like getting ticked off at a two-year-old for wetting the bed.

“It’s not … It’s not about the weight,” I said. “It’s … I’m sorry, how did you end up carrying a dead bear?”

“He wasn’t dead, just tranquilized,” Lunky corrected me. “Animal control arrived after you left, and the officer decided the only way to get Ben out of the tree-”

“I’m sorry, Ben? Who’s Ben?”

“Well, the bear, of course. The animal control guy told me I could pick a name for the bear. So I said ‘Ben,’ because my favorite book as a child was Gentle Ben by Walt Morey.”

I was rendered speechless, which Lunky took as a cue to continue.

“Anyhow, the animal control guy had to shoot Ben with one of those darts. That got Ben out of the tree, all right, but then he was just lying there on the sidewalk. The guy from animal control couldn’t lift him, so he asked me to help. But I knew it’d be easier if I just did it myself. So that’s what I did.”

“Did you tell the animal control guy you were a reporter?” I asked, when I finally found my voice.

“Why would that matter?”

Mindful of the fact that we are given only so much enamel in this life, I made a concerted effort not to grind my teeth. “Kevin, has anyone ever told you that reporters aren’t supposed to become part of the story they’re covering?”

Lunky pondered this for a moment.

“So I shouldn’t have named him?” he asked.

“Actually, you shouldn’t have picked him up to begin with.”

“Hmm. Sorry about that. I won’t let it happen again.”

“That’d be peachy,” I said and, as usual, Lunky missed my sarcasm.

I was about to continue my little journalism lecture when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tina Thompson closing in on me.

“You,” she said, pointing one finger at me, her eyes narrowed, her voice quietly dripping poison. “Yoooouuuu. My office. Now.”

* * *

While I would never consider myself an expert on the speech patterns of the adult female Homo sapiens, it is my general experience that when they lose the capacity of articulating in full sentences, it’s an indication they might possibly be angry.

Either that, or they’re having a stroke. In Tina’s case, it could have gone either way. But since she was still walking upright-and was puffing out her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie reincarnated-I took it that she was fairly incensed.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Lunky, who was typically oblivious.

I made the force march to her office, where she gestured for me to enter. She followed me inside, then slammed the door loud enough that half the heads in the newsroom jerked our way.

“Sit,” she said, pointing to one of the two chairs in front of her desk.

I thought she would go behind her desk, like she usually did. Instead, she selected the chair next to mine. I was alarmed by the choice. Not only did it increase our physical proximity-and the chance she’d wind up cuffing me on the ear-it made me feel more vulnerable to what was about to come. I’ve been subjected to what feels like a lifetime of editors yelling at me face-to-face, to the point where I’ve become inured to it. Sal Szanto, my previous editor, was particularly instrumental in increasing this tolerance.

But side to side? That’s not something I had ever been conditioned against. My defenses were much lower from that direction. And even if I twisted my body toward her as much as the seat allowed, she still had a clear flank attack.

“I’m not sure where to start with you right now,” Tina said, her voice alarmingly hushed. I definitely would have preferred yelling.

“Would you like me to get you something to drink while you think about it?” I asked, sounding much more flip than I intended.

She answered not with a word but with a soul-withering glower.

“Okay, so that’s a ‘no,’” I said, and hunkered down to wait for the coming storm.

She paused for ten seconds-it felt longer-then said, “When we last spoke, I was of the understanding that you would be working on a story with Kevin Lungford about the bear that was traipsing through Newark. Am I correct that was also your understanding?”

This was clearly one of those situations where it would be advantageous to say as little as possible, lest my mouth get me in any more trouble. So I just nodded.

“Well, in that case, it would be great if you could explain to me why you were talking with”-she interrupted herself to lean forward and grab a scrap of paper off her desk-“Nikki Papadopolous. She called here looking for you but didn’t want to leave a message on your voice mail, because she wasn’t sure if you checked it. She was explicit that she talk to someone who could get you a message. So the call got forwarded to me because, well, it seems I’m your boss. You do remember I’m your boss, right?”

I nodded again, though a bit more meekly this time.

“Well, good ol’ Nikki said she was from the State Street Grill in Bloomfield and said she had spoken to you earlier in the day but had forgotten to get your phone number,” Tina continued. “So you can imagine my curiosity as to how you ended up in Bloomfield when I thought I had sent you to Newark. You can imagine that, right?”

Another nod. Even smaller.

“And do you know what she told me?”

Head shake.

“Well, first she told me she thought you were an excellent reporter, and very cute on top of that, so kudos to you there, stud. Then she told me you had been asking questions about Nancy Marino. Now, I’m sorry, is the bear I asked you to track down named Nancy Marino?”

“No, his name is Ben,” I said, immediately regretting it.

“Really? Really. Ben, huh? Well, so you know something about the bear after all,” she said, her volume rising for a brief moment.

She stopped herself, did some strange breathing thing-yoga stuff, I imagined-then continued in her softer, scarier voice.

“Well, then perhaps you can explain this,” she said, reaching for another piece of paper on her desk and producing a printout of the dreaded Lunky-and-the-bear photo.

“The, uh, animal control guy asked Lunky, to, uh…” I started, and realized it was sounding lamer the more I talked, so I finished with: “He was just trying to be helpful.”

“Helpful? Really? And where were you, his supposed mentor, while he was being so helpful?”

I looked out Tina’s window, which offered a panoramic view of a brick wall, like the right answer might be written in the grout. Alas, there was nothing but graffiti.

“Were you in Bloomfield?” Tina prompted.

I considered saying that, at that point, I might have actually been in Newark-albeit downtown, several miles away from the bear, chatting with Big Jimmy. But that didn’t seem like it would aid my cause.

“Look, Tina, obviously I wasn’t with the kid,” I said. “We found the bear and the thing was up in a tree, and I really thought Lunky could handle it from there on his own. I was wrong. I apologize.”

Tina was making the kind of face I only thought was possible if someone was actively sucking on a lemon, but I continued:

“But, I’ve got to tell you, the story I’m working on instead is really-”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Tina said immediately.

“No, I’m serious, I think-”

“I don’t want to hear it!” she said, now in full crescendo. “What you did today was totally inexcusable.”

“Tina, it involves-”

“I don’t care. Look, we’ll talk about this more later. For right now, it’s”-she looked at her watch-“quarter after six. I better have a story about a bear in my basket by seven o’clock. And if it’s not the very best bear story I’ve ever read, you’re going to ride the copy desk for a month.”

Tina knew there was no greater threat to a free-range reporter such as myself than a month chained to a desk, scouring for typos. I’d rather do time as a galley slave. At least the boat is going somewhere.

* * *

With no time for moping, I returned to the intern pod, feeling the usual charge of adrenaline that accompanies being on deadline. There are people in our business who can’t handle the stress: tender souls who eventually wind up following gentler pursuits, like public relations. Me? I love the rush. There’s nothing that focuses your concentration like knowing you have forty-five minutes to write six hundred words.

“So,” I said as I arrived, “what do we have so far?”

I scooted a rolling chair next to Lunky, who puffed out his mile-thick chest and proudly turned the screen toward me. I began reading.

By Kevin Lungford

In William Faulkner’s acclaimed story “The Bear,” which is rightly gaining its place as one of the finest works of twentieth-century American short-form fiction, the hunting and ultimate slaying of a lame-pawed bruin becomes a powerful symbol of European encroachment into the Native American way of life, and the tragic consequences therein.

In John Irving’s quixotic, madcap romp The Hotel New Hampshire, the strength and sorrow of bears are an important and continuing theme; and the character of Susie the Bear, a young woman so ashamed by her appearance she wears a bear costume, deserves greater scrutiny within the field of LBGT literature as an example of the ways in which lesbians are forced to, in essence, cloak their sexuality.

And, of course, most schoolchildren can identify Ursa Major and Ursa Minor-literally “big bear” and “little bear”-by their more common names, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, yet do not know the names hearken to a classic story in Greek mythology that has been echoed in the canon of nearly every literary movement since.

I kept myself absolutely still for a few extra moments, pretending to be reading while I was actually trying to think of how to respond. My humane-to-interns policy was being rather sorely put to the test, but I was determined to stick with it.

“How is it? Pretty good, huh?” Lunky asked.

All I could think of was an article I read once that found the lowest-performing workers-people identified as being in the bottom twenty-five percent by their bosses-consistently rated themselves in the top twenty-five percent. While it seems to be a testament to the power of human self-delusion, the researchers concluded the real problem was that low-performing people lack the skills and training to know how bad they are.

Lunky clearly fit in that category, and I actually felt sorry for him. Princeton didn’t have a journalism program. No one had ever told him how to write a newspaper article. He just applied for an internship-to our sports department, no less-and the sports guys hired him because they thought a Princeton kid was probably smart enough to figure things out (and because they hoped he could hit a softball ten miles). No one had even given this kid Remedial Journalism, much less Journalism 101.

So I had to treat this as a teachable moment. And the best teachers start by building on strengths.

“Okay, so that’s a fine treatment on bears in literature,” I said, and Lunky grinned. “Now what about the, uh, bear in Newark?”

“Oh, I’ll be getting to that.”

“Yeah, you might want to consider moving that part up a bit,” I suggested.

“I didn’t want to rush the reader too much.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you. Did anyone ever tell you about the five W’s?”

“Wilde, Wells, Wordsworth … does Walt Whitman count as one or two?” he asked.

“Never mind,” I said, and started scrolling down.

Except below those three paragraphs was a cursor, blinking slowly and insistently, waiting for more copy that had not yet come. And below that was a fat little black bar that told me I had reached the end.

“Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“This is maybe five inches. We’re on the schedule for eighteen.”

“Oh, I figured I’d get maybe half of it done tonight, then finish it tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning,” I repeated. “By tomorrow morning, this thing is supposed to be in a newspaper, lying on front porches throughout New Jersey. It’s due in”-I looked up at a clock on the wall-“thirty-nine minutes.”

“Really?” he said, as if this was the first he’d heard of it. I was beginning to grasp why the words “By Kevin Lungford” had not yet appeared in our newspaper.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s review some basic concepts: when all else fails, make your story start with a kid. Editors love stories with kids in them almost as much as they love stories with animals. So if you have a kid and an animal, they’ll be so happy they’ll wet themselves. Did you interview any kids?”

“Oh, sure,” Lunky said, opening to a page in his notebook and showing it to me. “You told me to interview the young and the old, remember?”

I grabbed the notebook and flipped a few pages until I found what I needed.

“Start typing,” I said, clearing my throat and dictating: “‘Before yesterday, the only bear six-year-old Newark resident Tashee Cunningham saw on a regular basis was Winnie-the-Pooh-and then only if he went to the library.’”

“Winnie-the-Pooh?” Lunky asked, horrified. I sensed his concern he would lose credibility at the next faculty tea.

“With all due respect to John Irving, Winnie will be a little more familiar to our readers than Susie the Bear,” I assured him.

I continued my dictation: “That changed abruptly yesterday when a two-hundred-pound male bruin came ambling outside his kitchen.”

I went back to Lunky’s barely legible scrawl until I found the only usable quote from Tashee, who was, after all, only six. I read it aloud: “I yelled, ‘Mama! Mama! It’s a bear!’”

Lunky looked up from the keyboard. “Don’t you think that’s a little, I don’t know, obvious? Wouldn’t you rather be more oblique? Maybe we could craft an allegory of some sort?”

“You know we’re supposed to write this at an eighth-grade level, right?”

“Oh right,” he said, then added, “The eighth grade is when I started reading Joyce.”

“You better let me type,” I said.

For the next thirty-four minutes, Lunky read to me the contents of his notebook, which I attempted to translate into something that resembled a newspaper article. I suppose it was sort of like Joyce, in that it was pretty much stream-of-consciousness crap. In the world of Princeton Ph.D. candidates, they call that literature. In my business, we have a different term for that kind of writing: meatball surgery.

Nevertheless, we reached our eighteenth and final inch at exactly two minutes to seven.

“Aren’t you going to put your name on it?” Lunky asked.

“No, this is your first byline, and I want you to have it all to yourself,” I said.

“Aw, that’s great. Thanks. And hey, if you ever need me to lift anything heavy for you, just give me a call.”

I assured him I would, then went back to Tina’s office to tell her the story had been filed. She wasn’t there, so I wandered toward the copy desk, expecting she would be harassing someone there. Instead, I saw her curly brown head poking out of Harold Brodie’s office.

“Carter,” she said, then added the five words that turned my legs into spaghetti: “Brodie wants to see you.”

* * *

At least outwardly, there should have been nothing remotely intimidating about our executive editor. To begin with, he was a small man, and ever since his seventieth birthday, he seemed to be shrinking even further. He had this high-pitched voice, these flyaway eyebrows, this near-constant need to urinate-all things that afflict men of advancing age and shrinking vitality.

Yet on the very rare occasions I was summoned into his office to discuss a story, my usual glibness was replaced with stumbling uncertainty. The instincts that served me so well elsewhere turned out to be false, as if Brodie’s domain was some kind of opposite world. Every note that came out of my mouth sounded off-key.

Something about the guy just frightened me. He had been the supreme ruler of the Eagle-Examiner since I was in diapers, and while most of the time he reigned with a velvet fist, he was still known to enforce discipline when and where necessary. There was always talk that in his younger days he had been so ruthless-diminishing hardened reporters to whimpering toddlers with the ferocity and precision of his attacks-that my older colleagues still referred to his office as “the woodshed.”

Still, up until now, I had never experienced Brodie as anything more than a kindly old man. I didn’t know what he looked like when wielding the paddleboard. And I guess that’s what scared me most: the unknown.

As I entered the office, Tina had her head bowed, like she didn’t want to look at me. I was a little miffed at her for running to Brodie with this bear thing. The cardinal sins of the newspaper world, transgressions that will get you fired immediately and without further comment, are things like plagiarism and making up sources. Insubordination doesn’t come near that list. We are, after all, reporters. Lack of respect for authority is part of our job description.

Still, I obviously had some kind of punishment coming my way or I wouldn’t have been summoned into the woodshed. Brodie gestured toward a chair in front of his desk, and I gingerly lowered myself into it. Some bit of classical music, heavy on the violins, poured from a set of small speakers next to his computer. Brodie closed his eyes and rested his tented fingers against his lips. He was either settling into deep contemplation or had fallen asleep. It was always hard to tell. He was famous for doing this-it was known as the “Brodie Think”-and it lasted as long as was needed for the old man to get his head around a situation.

For a long minute, I sat there in dreadful silence, waiting for whatever I had coming. Somewhere during that time, I decided that, since this was opposite world, I should do the reverse of what I normally did in Brodie’s office. So whereas I ordinarily would have sat quietly, waiting for the Brodie Think to end, this time I started talking.

“Look, before you start, let me just say I owe Tina an apology,” I said. “I know I should have just done what she asked. What happened with the bear is entirely my fault, and I accept full responsibility.”

Brodie opened his eyes and I could immediately tell that, as usual, I had said the wrong thing.

“Bear?” he said. “What happened with the bear?”

I looked to Tina for help, but she shook her head.

“Uh, never mind,” I said, now totally confused. Brodie settled back into his pondering, and I shifted in my seat. The violins had given way to something more ominous, something involving low brass. Brodie let another minute-or maybe it was a year-pass before speaking.

“Carter, I’m very disturbed by several things I’ve heard about you,” he said. “I just received a phone call from Gary Jackman.”

The name hit me with a jolt. What did this possibly have to do with him? The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach told me this conversation was not going to end well.

“Gary has been a friend to this newsroom during difficult times,” Brodie continued. “I don’t need to tell you how much worse things could have been had he not been an ally.”

I clenched my jaw. A friend? An ally? Why, because he hadn’t insisted on rolling a guillotine into the newsroom every time we had another round of layoffs?

“Now,” Brodie said. “He tells me you made a scene at a funeral home yesterday. Do you care to respond to that?”

“I … I wouldn’t call it a scene,” I said, my words foundering as usual around Brodie. “It was … We … We had a little run-in, I suppose.”

“He said you called him a name,” Brodie said. “Is that true?”

I scanned my memory and, oh shoot, it was. I just thought he hadn’t heard me.

“Yes,” I said timidly.

“What name did you call him?”

This was getting torturous.

“Dshbg,” I mumbled.

“Say again?”

“Douche bag,” I said, louder this time, and I could tell Brodie was unimpressed by my word choice. “But, in my defense, he really was being a douche bag.”

Tina, head still bowed, actually groaned. Brodie pointed a long, thin, old-man finger at me and raised his already high voice another octave.

“You are way out of line, young man,” he yelped. “Way out of line.”

“Sorry. Sorry, it was just-”

Brodie glared at me and I stopped talking.

“He also said you were sexually harassing one of his secretaries…”

“I didn’t harass-”

“… and that you misrepresented yourself as not being a reporter,” Brodie said, talking over me. “Is that true?”

“I … I was just…”

“Is it true? Did you misrepresent yourself or not? Yes or no? Did you say you were”-he looked at some notes he had kept-“Ted from accounting?”

Brodie was still on the other side of the desk, but if he leaned forward any further, I was going to be able to smell the Werther’s Original on his breath. Tina had raised her head just slightly to see me answer. I thought about explaining myself, telling them the reason I was skulking around Jackass is because I suspected he was a killer. But in the moment, it felt like some kind of desperately invented story-especially when I had nothing but coincidence and supposition to prove it, and when I wasn’t totally convinced myself that’s what happened.

I was trapped.

“Yes,” I said.

Tina’s head sank again. Brodie leaned back, closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

“You’ve always been one of my favorite reporters, but I don’t know what’s happening with you right now,” Brodie said. “We can tolerate a lot of behavior around here, but we still have standards of professional conduct. I can’t have you running around higgledy-piggledy, treating the publisher of this newspaper with such blatant disrespect.

“I’m afraid I have no choice,” he concluded. “As of this moment, you are suspended without pay until further notice.”

He was the kind of man who moved quickly from one challenge to the next. There was no time to dwell on things. So he had actually already started to forget about Nancy Marino within a few days of killing her. Sure, he went to her wake, and he would go to her funeral. But he thought he had put the problem squarely behind him-with his tracks well covered-when, suddenly, that reporter showed up, snooping around.

He didn’t like reporters, not at all. He found them disrespectful and constantly overly familiar, saying things they had no right to say, asking questions with such rash impertinence. He detested that they seemed to consider themselves his equal in some ways. What gave them the nerve to act like that? They would be nothing without the newspaper behind them. That was the only reason anyone paid them any heed. Didn’t they realize that? They fancied themselves essential components of the machine-unique and vital-when really they were just replaceable, interchangeable parts.

He had to pretend he thought otherwise, of course. He pandered to their inflated egos, made them feel justified in their self-importance. He never let on what he really thought about them, and they never would have been able to guess how much he despised them. But even on their best days, he considered them pests.

He wasn’t quite sure what to make of Carter Ross at first. Ross was clearly bright, which was cause for concern-dumber reporters were easier to manipulate. Then again, Ross seemed nice enough, harmless actually.

But it’s the nice ones you have to look out for. And as soon as Ross came around, throwing about the name “Nancy Marino,” it was clear he was anything but harmless. To have a reporter like Ross asking questions about her, clearly curious about her, dredging her name up like there was something to be discovered about her. That brought a new and ominous twist to the Nancy Marino Problem.

It was possible-not probable but possible-that Ross would be able to put everything together. It depended on just how smart he was, of course, and how dogged he would be in searching. But if he managed to talk to the right people, hear certain things from the NLRB, from the IFIW, from any of the places there might have been small shreds of evidence left behind … well, it could become an issue.

It could not be allowed. Carter Ross was now, officially, a threat.