The Scarecrow

After picking up the mug shot of Darnell Hicks I walked back to the Times building and up to the third-floor newsroom. I didn’t bother checking in because I had already sent my editor a budget line on the drug sweep story. I planned to make some calls and flesh it out before I went back to Prendo and tried to convince him it was a story that ought to go out front on the home page as well as the print edition.

The 928-page printout of the Winslow confession as well as the other documents I’d sent to the copy shop were waiting for me on my desk. I sat down and had to resist the urge to immediately dive into the confession. But I pushed the six-inch stack to the side and went to the computer. I opened my address book on the screen and looked up the number for the Reverend William Treacher. He was the head of a South L.A. association of ministers and was always good for a viewpoint contrary to that of the LAPD.

I had just picked up the phone to call Preacher Treacher, as he was informally known by his flock as well as the local media, when I felt a presence hovering over me and looked up to see Alan Prendergast.

“Didn’t you get my message?” he asked.

“No, I just got back and wanted to call Preacher Treacher before everybody else did. What’s up?”

“I wanted to talk about your story.”

“Didn’t you get the budget line I sent? Let me make this call real quick and then I might have more to add to it.”

“Not today’s story, Jack. Cook’s already putting it together. I want to hear about your long-term story. We have the futures meeting in ten minutes.”

“Wait a minute. What do you mean Cook’s already putting today’s story together?”

“She’s writing it up. She came back from the press conference and said you were working together on it. She already called Treacher, too. Got good stuff.”

I held back on telling him that Cook and I weren’t supposed to be working together on it. It was my story and I’d told her so.

“So whadaya got, Jack? It’s related to today’s thing, right?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

I was still stunned by Cook’s move. Competition within the news-room is common. I just hadn’t expected her to be so bold as to lie her way onto a story.

“Jack? I don’t have much time.”

“Uh, right. Yeah, it’s about the murder of Denise Babbit-but from the killer’s angle. It’s about how sixteen-year-old Alonzo Winslow came to be charged with murder.”

Prendo nodded.

“You have the goods?”

By “the goods,” I knew he was asking if I had direct access. He wouldn’t be interested in a story with police said used as attribution everywhere. He wouldn’t want to see the word allegedly anywhere near this piece if he was going to try to give it a good ride on the futures budget. He wanted a crime feature, a story that went behind the basic news everybody already had and rocked the reader’s world with gritty reality. He wanted breadth and depth, the hallmark features of any Times story.

“I have a direct line in. I’ve got the kid’s grandmother and his lawyer, and I’m probably going to see the kid tomorrow.”

I pointed to the freshly printed stack of documents on my desk.

“And that’s the pot of gold. His nine-hundred-page confession. I shouldn’t have it but I do. And nobody else will get it.”

Prendo nodded with approval and I could tell he was thinking, trying to come up with a way to sell the story in the meeting or make it better. He backed out of the cubicle, grabbed a nearby chair and pulled it over.

“I’ve got an idea, Jack,” he said as he sat down and leaned toward me.

He was using my name too much and the leaning into my personal space was uncomfortable and seemed completely phony since he had never done it with me before. I didn’t like the way this was going.

“What is it, Alan?”

“What if it wasn’t just about how a boy became a murderer? What if it was also about how a girl became a murder victim?”

I thought about it for a moment and slowly nodded. And that was my mistake, because when you start by saying yes, it becomes hard to put the brakes on and say no.

“It’s just going to take me more time when I split the focus of the story like that.”

“No, it won’t because you won’t have to split your focus. You stay with that kid and give us a kick-ass story. We’ll put Cook on the vic and she’ll cover that angle. Then you, Jack, weave both strands together and we’ve got a column-one story.”

Column one on the front page was reserved each day for the signature story of the paper. The best-written piece, the one with the most impact, the long-term project-if the story was good enough, it went out front, above the fold and in column one. I wondered if Prendergast knew he was taunting me. In seven years with the Times I had never had a column-one story. In more than two thousand days on the beat, I had never come up with the best piece of the day. He was waving the possibility of going out the door with a column-one at me like a big fat carrot.

“Did she give you this idea?”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? Cook.”

“No, man, I just thought of it. Right now. What do you think?”