The Knowland Retribution

West Texas

Leonard Martin was smiling.

Meeting with Isobel Gitlin had been a risk. He’d gone into it aware of the danger, unable to fully discount it. There were other ways he could have made his point, protected Harlan Jennings, prevented future cops under pressure from putting up other patsies. He could have done all that without compromising himself. If she had seen him… but she hadn’t, had she? Had he, even by accident, revealed his strikingly different physical package, he might well have risked his anonymity. Leonard had taken a gamble, all right. And now, drinking coffee in a west Texas roadside diner, a day west of Clarksville and less than another’s drive from Santa Fe, he knew he’d won.

Isobel Gitlin was no enemy. She might even be a friend. He’d just learned as much from the front page of today’s New York Times. Isobel’s two-column story ran in the upper right, the spot reserved

for the day’s number one event. E. COLI DISASTER SURVIVOR ADMITS 4 CORPORATE SHOOTINGS

And below, in a smaller face: LEONARD MARTIN OF GEORGIA VOWS OTHERS WILL DIE

What pleased him most was the picture above the fold, middle of the page. It was taken at a closing, one of the last he’d attended. It was cropped to show only him and the shoulder and arm of the buyer or seller-whoever was standing beside him. Leonard didn’t remember the man or the closing. The picture showed him in a tan suit. The buttons were open, the double-breasted jacket parted over his bulky stomach and torso. His dark tie had flown away from his shirt. It stuck out crookedly over the front of his suit. The knot of his tie was askew and the top shirt button open. The suit was clearly wrinkled. He looked awful, and thought the paper’s reproduction process made him appear even worse: pathetic. So much the better.

In the picture, Leonard looked distant and dazed. He was not smiling the way he always did in closing shots before. His face held only a vacant gaze. Nothing meant anything to him after, and it showed. His long hair was straggly, messy, uncombed. He was very fat. Even now he took a small shock on seeing how fat he had been. The caption read: “Leonard Martin in a Photograph Taken Three Years Ago.”

The story told how Isobel had been blindfolded throughout the interview. She was unable to describe his appearance or confirm his identity as Leonard Martin-visually. Despite that limitation, she wrote that there existed no question the man she met was Leonard Martin. She was betting her reputation and future on it; so too, if to a lesser extent, was the New York Times. No need now to shave his beard, grow his hair, or keep the bottle of Grecian Formula bought on a fearful impulse somewhere in New Jersey. Meeting Isobel Gitlin had not given him away.

He assumed that faced with a situation in which Isobel could not or would not say she saw Leonard Martin, her editors had grilled her hard on her identification and bought into her position. He was absolutely correct. The photo editors at the Times had plenty of pictures to choose from, and Leonard was sure Isobel Gitlin was not consulted about which one to run.

He found no surprises in what she wrote. She described in detail how a gray sedan picked her up and drove her to the meeting. She did her best to draw a picture of the driver. She identified the meeting place as “an undisclosed location in New York City.” She called Leonard simply “a well-to-do real estate lawyer from Alpharetta, Georgia.” Isobel wrote about Nina Martin, Ellen Lawrence, and Ellen’s two sons, Mark and Scott. She wrote that Leonard Martin had lost them all to an especially virulent and new strain of E. coli poisoning carried by Knowland amp; Sons’ tainted meat. She described, very accurately he thought, Leonard’s implacable anger, his determination to kill those he held responsible. Leonard was more than content with what she wrote and how she wrote it. She’d told the world what he told her.

The article described the deaths of Christopher Hopman, Billy MacNeal, Floyd Ochs, and Pat Grath with details that could only be attributed to the killer. He’d mentioned his practice on a small trampoline-a preparation vital to shooting Pat Grath from a small boat bobbing in the waters of Lake Mead-and she printed it. Her article stated that the New York Times had handed over “vital physical evidence” to federal authorities. It described the rifles and ammunition Leonard used and then left with Isobel’s doorman. She wrote that the Times had also retrieved the Pat Grath murder weapon-an expensive, one-of-a-kind, Holland amp; Holland double rifle. It was found in the Nevada desert several miles east of Las Vegas (where he’d told her to look), and had also been put, by the New York Times, in the hands of the proper authorities. Leonard’s second letter was printed in full within a half-tone margin. Reading it, Leonard did not think she could have done better.

Of course, she didn’t tell everything she knew. Leonard correctly assumed that she was looking to other days and editions. En route to New York from St. Thomas, Isobel had in fact remembered a senior editor whom she met once, in her first week at the paper. He did his best to impress her in thirty seconds or less by saying, “Never forget, we have to print another one tomorrow.” It sounded like tinny wisdom then. She’d made it an iron precept by the time the plane touched down.

Inside section one, the Times ran a half-page box showing guns and ammo with small-type insets on technical specs and retail prices. On the opposite page it ran a mafia-style table of organization. There were small headshots of all the players, with lines connecting one to the other: Leonard, his wife, daughter, and grandsons; Wayne Korman and Floyd Ochs from Knowland amp; Sons in Lucas; Harlan Jennings off to the side; Billy MacNeal and Pat Grath of Second Houston Holding; Christopher Hopman from Alliance; the Wall Street gang of four-still alive and breathing-perspiring, Leonard hoped, to the point of dehydration.

Dr. Ganga Roy’s name was nowhere to be found. Leonard thought that the Times ’ bright lawyers might have fixed on the paper’s relationship with the Rockefeller Institute and related liabilities. Leonard knew that Isobel could not prove the material he provided was, to a certainty, Dr. Roy’s work product. Therefore, he suspected, the lawyers vetoed using her name. Isobel and her editors probably yelled themselves blue in the face. But as a lawyer he also knew that in the absence of proof absolute, legal had the better of the case.

Instead, the story credited “scientific data in the possession of the Times ” together with “reliable sources” in support of their description of what took place in Nathan Stein’s office. Leonard recognized everything Isobel wrote as the truth.

Isobel’s news report, distinguished by her exclusive ID of America’s most notorious home-grown desperado, offered no judgments on his crimes. Macmillan lobbied for a list of words and phrases: “corporate-terrorist,” “serial killer,” “unstable,” even “deranged,” a word that was dismissed by a quick, harsh look from the Moose. In light of his exasperation, that one wasn’t even considered. The others were talked through and all rejected. Macmillan offered his ideas in a high-level meeting attended by Gold and other senior types. A senior editor suggested three names-all seasoned, experienced Times reporters, who might “step in and help you out.” Isobel assured him, and everyone else, that she needed no help.

The same editor then offered the idea that Isobel ought not to write the story at all. “After all,” he said, “to some degree she’s now part of it. How can she be expected to write it?” He again brought up the same three names she previously rejected, and proposed they write the story “about you, and, of course, with your input.” Isobel recognized each of the three named reporters. She’d had not so much as a “good morning” from any of them. She knew them only by reputation.

“I thought they thought the story was b-b-bullshit,” she said. “You know, crap, and not the kind of crap that belongs in the New York Times. ” The Moose couldn’t help laughing. He quickly reached for a glass of water. Isobel said, “I don’t need help, and,” she smiled sweetly, “I always did poorly on the ‘works well with others’ marks.” They all backed off except Macmillan. A few minutes later he submitted a paragraph questioning Leonard Martin’s sanity, and citing the work of two forensic psychiatrists.

Had she asked him to, the Moose would have canned Macmillan right then, even in front of the others. Ed never knew how close he came to sniffing around the Daily News. Isobel felt her power building, not unlike the frightening force of a hurricane picking up steam over warm waters, hell-bent for landfall, God knows where.

The Times ’ unmasking of Leonard Martin dominated the media. Papers across the country drowned it in full-color ink. The Europeans noted it prominently, and even in Japan one paper’s front page screamed “Crazy American” across the same picture of Leonard Martin the New York Times printed. The cable networks and talk radio raised the story yet again, like Lazarus from a shallow grave. Isobel was more than a property now. As she once saw Kevin Costner remark in Bull Durham, she was in “the Show.” A second cover on Newsweek, and one on Time also confirmed it. Now the talking heads treated her differently-she was no longer the waif reporter. She had acquired gravitas. “I always believed in Isobel” pretty much summed up the general feeling. One deadpan prime-time showman used exactly those words. In New Mexico, Leonard watched it all unfold with more genuine pleasure than he had felt in years.

Isobel got calls from Time Warner and Newsweek offering her obscene amounts to join their stables. Rupert Murdoch himself called Isobel, his tacky accent bringing a whiff of Fiji bars that attracted Australians with schemes or lines of merchandise to sell. Rupert suggested that she decide precisely what it was that was she wanted, design herself a compensation package, and call him back. He emphasized that he felt she’d fit well on the air and in print. “Whatever you want, I already agree.” He even crammed a delightful smile somewhere into his voice.

After thanking Rupert and promising to do as asked, Isobel reflected that, like Alice, she was now in a world where things had spun out of control. Later on, the Moose told her Murdoch was well known to make such calls himself. “I suppose he gets off on it,” said Gold, adding that from what he heard Murdoch always reneged on the money part. The New Yorker and Rolling Stone were asking her for cover stories. “Write about Leonard Martin,” she was told by one. “Write any damn thing you want,” said the other.

Page six in the New York Post, and even the hometown London tabloids, linked her to a new job daily. If, as in olden days, the New York Post published twice a day, she’d have been changing employment twice as often. The silliness reached ridiculous proportions when the supermarket tabloids reported on her fight against cancer, her joyful pregnancy, her fun-filled weekend in the Swiss Alps with a European prince who was twenty years her senior. “How do they get those pictures?” she asked as she and the Moose studied a photo of Isobel on the high Tibetan plateau, arm-in-arm with a movie star she’d never met and didn’t recognize.

The heads of programming from every major cable news channel called with escalating numbers, some of which stood up handsomely against the print offers pouring in. They were encouraged no doubt by their edgy producers and highly stressed news directors. ABC and NBC let it be known that no cable outfit could make an offer that they would not match and exceed. CBS, hard-pressed to pay its ancient news performers whose packages reflected seniority and therefore weighed the network down, was forced to abstain from the frenzy.

Mysteriously, or so it seemed to many after the fact, no one in authority gave any thought to the notion that Isobel Gitlin might jump ship. She was not a contract employee. She worked at the pleasure of management; people departed at management’s pleasure. Thus it had always been and would always be. A New York Times senior vice president’s wife raised the subject at dinner one evening and was rebuked. In front of others, her husband told her, “People do not leave the New York Times. The New York Times is where they come to be !”

Isobel finally agreed to appear somewhere. She decided on 60 Minutes. She chose it because CBS never offered her a penny, not even a job. In a world gone crazy, she judged CBS to be the last refuge of sanity. They told her Ed Bradley would tape the conversation at Isobel’s apartment three days before the broadcast. She looked forward to the experience. The network promoted her all week. It seemed that every break had a promo promising “ Isobel Gitlin, only on 60 Minutes, this Sunday, after football.” These messages promised the “whole story” plus “exclusive revelations.”

“My God,” she told Mel Gold, “is this my fifteen minutes? When will it end?” He only smiled. He’d already told her it was too late.

“You never know,” he said. “Woodward and Bernstein got thirty years out of theirs.”

By Thursday, she’d just about mastered the stutter, partly by learning to make the camera an ally. The awareness of its harmlessness to her worked like an umbrella in hand on a threatening day; more often than not it kept the clouds away. In her mind the camera became a machine intended to help her focus. She also had come to understand that the defect itself, the stutter, loomed large in her legend. “Oh my,” she thought, “do I really have a legend?” Before the cameras rolled she asked Mr. Bradley if it was true that, as she’d heard, some producers at CNN, FOX, and MSNBC had lost their jobs for failing to book her.

He told her it was possible. “This business eats people for lunch,” he added.

That Sunday’s 60 Minutes show got its best ratings of the season. For CBS, it was one of the few times they didn’t lose audience after football. Nonetheless, Ed Bradley’s interview was not what he expected. At first, Isobel gave him no new information. She talked at length about things she’d already written about. Bradley’s frustration surfaced when he came to understand that Isobel was skillfully holding back anything not already public knowledge. The blockbuster news he hoped for, expected, been told he was going to get, was nowhere on the horizon. What’s more, she demonstrated devilish mastery of the process, especially in view of her reputed inexperience. Isobel had the infuriating knack of sounding as though she was offering new, exciting facts while revealing nothing. Eventually, her inquisitor threw up both hands and said, “Stop the tape.” He glared with undisguised anger at Isobel.

“Something wrong?” she asked. A production assistant brought her bottled water. A makeup man worked on her forehead.

“Yes.” He was trying, gentlemanlike, to take the edge off his voice. “I’m not getting anything here.”

“What is it you want?” Isobel asked.

“A b-blockbuster’s what we expected. Something new and exciting.” She thought that it was absolutely odd that her own voice was strong as steel while he tripped on the always dangerous b. “Something we don’t already know. I thought we were going to get into this. In all fairness, that’s what we were led to expect.”

“I see,” she said, returning the water. “Something… b-big. I think I have it now. Get the tape ready and ask me how I feel about Leonard Martin and then about my future.”

“Okay!” He yelled at the crew, and they bustled.

Bradley was all ease and purpose again, speckled beard glowing in the meticulous lighting. “Tell me, if you can, what do you think of this guy? How do you feel about Leonard Martin?”

Isobel said, “When I was a child, in France, my grandmother told me about a neighbor. During the war the Germans occupied the neighbor’s house. They threw him out-him and his wife and his children-into the barn. They made them servants of the Nazis. The man’s wife and both small children died that winter from disease and hunger and despair. When the war ended, my grandmother’s neighbor reclaimed his home. Many years later, she told me-forty years or more-a man came and knocked on the door. He was an older man, a German, traveling with a young boy. He was one of the German officers who had occupied this man’s house. I suppose he wanted to show his grandson where he had been during the war. Well, when the neighbor recognized the German, b-both of them old men by now, he reached behind the door, got the shotgun he’d kept there for decades, and killed the German right there on his doorstep, in front of the man’s grandson.” Isobel paused to take a deep breath. Ed Bradley gave her one of his practiced looks; the one that asks, “What does that mean?”

Isobel said, “Leonard Martin sees himself as that neighbor.”

“Do you?” Bradley asked.

“Do you?”

Bradley was speechless. It was a great look, and Isobel wondered how long it took him to perfect it. Then he said, “This has been quite a ride for you. I mean personally. What does all this mean for Isobel Gitlin? You’ve got a wonderful future ahead of you. So, what are your plans?”

Isobel’s answer, as disclosed to the world on that Sunday evening, sent a wickedly rapturous rush through the breast of the wife of a certain New York Times senior vice president. Few people outside the business would care, but a Richter scale for the global media culture would have surely shuddered and shattered when Isobel said, “I have no contract with the paper I’m with now. [She didn’t even call it by its name!] Who knows, I might like to return to London.”

“Back to England. Back home? Have you thought about that?”

“Yes, I have. There are so many things I’d like to do. I’m not married to the newspaper, you know. [Once more she failed to identify the New York Times. The New York Times!] I feel an obligation to the unfinished obituaries of Christopher Hopman, Billy MacNeal, Floyd Ochs, and Pat Grath. Leonard Martin is really part of that. I started these stories, and until I’ve finished them I cannot walk away. You see that, don’t you? But I’ve no desire to be celebrated, famous, or turned into a journalist with a capital J. ”

Ed Bradley’s face registered no expression at all. But for his unchanged posture he might have been pole-axed. Isobel Gitlin, a woman on the very edge of media stardom, fame, and riches-the crowning achievement of American culture-had just said she wanted no part of it.

“You just want to go back to writing obituaries?” Bradley asked.

She addressed herself to the friendly camera. “People die every day, don’t they. The stories I write are the stories of their lives, and I would hope I do it in a way that’s both interesting to the reader and respectful of the subject. I believe obituaries are a noble part of this country’s freedom of the press. I continue to strive to live up to the standard set by Robert McG. Thomas.”

She was careful not to say “our country.” She was, after all, a proud Fijian, carrying a British passport.

“You’re leaving the Times?” asked Bradley, having quickly refitted the smile that helped make him rich and famous. “You can’t be serious about going back to… to writing obituaries. You’ve got big stories ahead, no? Books maybe. And you’re thinking of leaving the New York Times? Leaving the newspaper business altogether? Going back to England?”

“I might,” she said, light as a feather, and smiled right into the camera.

Watching the show at home in the Whitestone section of Queens, bourbon and soda in one hand, giant salted pretzel in the other, Mel Gold let out a grunt of epic proportions. His wife hurried in from the kitchen, fearing it was something to do with his health.

“Sonofabitch!” said the Moose, unable to wipe the smile from his face.