The Scarecrow

It sounded like a good quote but it came from the wrong voice. The reality was that Treacher was an opportunistic weasel. I never bought that he was standing up for the community. I thought he was usually just standing up for himself, getting on TV and in the papers to further serve his celebrity and the benefits it brought. I had once suggested to an editor that we do an investigation of Treacher but was immediately shot down. The editor said, “No, Jack, we need him.”

And that was true. The paper needed people like Treacher to voice the contrarian view, to give the incendiary remark and get the fire burning.

“Sounds good,” I said to Angela. “I’ll let you get back to it and I’ll go up and write up a budget line for the other story.”

“Here,” she said.

She slid the short stack of papers across the table to me.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing, really, but it might save you some time. Last night before I went home I was thinking about the story after you told me what you were working on. I almost called you to talk more about it and suggest we work together. But I chickened out and went on Google instead. I checked out ‘trunk murder’ and found there is a long history of people ending up in the trunks of cars. A lot of women, Jack. And a lot of mob guys, too.”

I turned the pages over and looked at the top sheet. It was a printout of a Las Vegas Review-Journal story from almost a year earlier. The first paragraph told me it was about the conviction of a man charged with murdering his ex-wife, putting her body into the trunk of his car, and then parking it in his own garage.

“That’s just a story that sounded a little like yours,” she said. “There’s some others in there about historical cases. There’s a local one from the nineties where this movie guy was found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, which was parked on the hill above the Hollywood Bowl. And I even found a website called trunk murder dot com, but it’s still under construction.”

I nodded hesitantly.

“Uh, thanks. I’m not sure where all this might fit in but it’s good to be thorough, I guess.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

She pushed her chair back and picked up her empty cup.

“Well, okay, then. I’ll e-mail you a copy of today’s story as soon as I have it ready to send in.”

“You don’t have to do that. It’s your story now.”

“No, your name is going on it, too. You asked the questions that gave it good ol’ B and D.”

Breadth and depth. What the editors want. What the reputation of the Times was built on. Drilled into you from day one, when you came to the velvet coffin. Give your stories breadth and depth. Don’t just tell what happened. Tell what it means and how it fits into the life of the city and the reader.

“Okay, well, thanks,” I said. “Just let me know and I’ll give it a quick read.”

“You want to walk up together?”

“Uh, no, I’m going to get a coffee and maybe look through all this stuff you came up with.”

“Suit yourself.”

She gave me a pouty smile like I was missing something really good and then walked away. I watched her dump her coffee cup into a trash can and head out of the cafeteria. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I didn’t know if I was her partner or mentor, whether I was training her to take over or she already had. My instinct told me that I might only have eleven days left on the job but I would have to watch my back with her during every one of them.

After writing up a budget line and e-mailing it to Prendergast, and then signing off on Angela’s story for the print edition, I found an unoccupied pod in the far corner of the newsroom where I could concentrate on the Alonzo Winslow transcript and not be intruded on by phone calls, e-mail or other reporters. The transcript had my full attention now and as I read, I marked with yellow Post-its pages where there were significant quotes.

The reading went fast except in places where there was more than the back and forth of ping-pong dialogue. At one point the detectives scammed Winslow into a damaging admission and I had to read the passage twice to understand what they did. Grady apparently pulled out a tape measure. He explained to Winslow that they wanted to take a measurement of the line that ran from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his first index finger on each hand.

Winslow cooperated and then the detectives announced that the measurements matched to within a quarter inch the strangulation marks left on Denise Babbit’s neck. Winslow responded with a vigorous denial of involvement in the murder and then made a big mistake.

WINSLOW: Beside that, the bitch wasn’t even strangled with anybody’s hands. Motherfucker tied a plastic bag over her head.

WALKER: And how do you know that, Alonzo?

I could almost see Walker smiling when he asked it. Winslow had slipped up in a huge way.

WINSLOW: I don’t know, man. It must’ve been on TV or something. I heard it somewhere.