Chapter 5: Hold the presses

  

 

The newspaper office where Nat worked was not the same one he had started at, an old storefront office filled with the scent of ink and rotting newsprint.

The publisher had started the newspaper after con consolidation had destroyed the original hometown publication.

The publisher believed people would pick up his paper if he made it more reflective of the town they lived in and he was right.

The new paper flourished after a fashion. The son of the founder had brought to the paper his own ideas, making deals with local politicians – much in the same way his father had, giving good news coverage to those who steered advertising his way, bad news for those who didn’t.

Only the son was never as savvy as his father, bad deals gave the paper a sour reputation nearly as negative as from the day of Dix’s reign, only nowhere near as profitable.

The son was also a cheap son of a bitch, refusing to invest in the technology necessary to let the paper compete in the internet era, and so the paper was more than a little of an aniconism, living in a 1970s-like time warp while the rest of the world plunged into the 21st Century.

I like the father; but barely tolerated the son.

This was only partly due to the skewing the paper gave me prior to my dismissal from the police department. He was a disagreeable and opinionated bore, who saw his primary mission in life as passing judgement on other people, innocent and guilty a like.

In my case, it was a mingling of both, although he could not have known my guilt or innocence at the time, and this did not stop him from laying my life out in headlines like an exquisite corpse.

If I hadn’t been a drunk before that, I certainly was afterwards.

Nat was his chief surgeon, and in a rare expression of guilt, Nat apologized. Yet, so used to wielding his scalpel, Nat’s column had opened me up deeper than any of the owner’s headlines could, exposing me in a way far word  than all the other stories combined. I became the local tabloid’s sensation from which I could not recover.

Every now and then, someone gives me guff about it, only these days I have less to lose – perhaps nothing.

“What do you want?” the pug-nosed publisher asked when I showed up at the office. He had a voice like a stereo speaker with a broken woofer, plemy and always on the verge of breaking up.

“I came to look over the archive of Nat’s old stories,” I said.

“What for? He’s dead. So is his column.”

“I still want to have a look” I said, watching the publisher’s thick eyebrows rise.

“Is there something here I should know about?” he asked, lowering his voice, his gaze shifting nervously around at the handful of others that occupied desks deeper into his store front empire. “Nat did die of natural causes, didn’t he?”

“That’s what the medical Examiner said,” I said.

“Then what the fuck are you up to?”
“Let’s just say I’m curious.”

“If you find something, I want the exclusive,” the publisher said, looking hungry the way a shark might.

I paused, eating the words I had intended to say, suppressing the urge to flatten his pudgy nose. I didn’t need to go to jail on the account of slug like him, no more than I needed new headlines that would drag out of mothballs tales most people have forgotten about.

“You’ll get whatever I find,” I said.

He rose, grabbing a ring of keys from the top drawer of his desk, then led me towards the back of what had once served as a bank, the vault with its round door open wide except for the metal gate across its wide maw.

Even though the paper had a web presence and an electronic archive, the publisher was too cheap to hire anyone to scan the old newsprint editions, which were kept in large bound books lined along shelves inside the vault.

“These go back to when my father started the paper,” the publisher said. “We hired Nat a short time after that.”

“Is all his work here?”

“All except his last column. We’re running that this week.”

“Can I look at that first?”

“Only if you promise not to disclose what it says until the paper comes out.”

He directed me to a computer at a desk just outside the vault, where the column scrolled up onto the screen, more than a bit haunting since it brought Nat back to life, a ghost voice from beyond the grave.

The column was about a prostitute.

This was a down and out stripper who he had volunteered to help out, a woman who put on dyke shows for co parties, although she claimed she wasn’t a dyke.

She was apparently addicted to something, and perhaps more than a little mentally ill.

A couple of the cops decided she would be willing to got further than she said she would. When she filed a complaint the police chief decided to investigate her.

I knew the chief well enough to know how likely this was, and how that chief used his internal affairs department to keep track of his enemies, inside and outside the department. He had a core of select cops who operated on his behalf, cops who the poor prostitute complained about.

I glanced up from the screen to study the publisher’s face.

“You’re actually going to print this?” I asked.

“Damned straight,” he said.

“The chief will hunt you down if you do.”

“It’s not all we have on him,” the publisher said. “We’ve been compiling stuff on him for months.”

“Do you have contact for the woman?”

The publisher’s puffy eyes narrowed. “What for?”

“There’s something odd about Nat’s death I need to clear up.”

“Odd? In what way?”

“Suspicious,” I said.

“But the medical examiner…”

“I’m less worried about how he died than the circumstances surrounding his death.”

“He died in a fucking hospital,” the publisher said. “What’s suspicious about that?”

“He didn’t die in the hospital.”

“All right – he did on the way to the hospital. You don’t need to be so technical.”

“He didn’t die in the ambulance either. I arranged all that to protect his family.”

“Then where did he fucking die?”

I told him. The pudgy man’s mouth fell open, unable to utter a word.

“I’m trying to find what led him to the motel.”

The publisher’s shock passed quickly. He grew grim and professional again.

“Tell me what you find out,” he said. “This is a hotter story than I could have imagined.

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