The Scarecrow

“Death is my beat,” I whispered to myself. “I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it.”

Words spoken before but not as my own eulogy. I nodded to myself and knew just how I was going to go out. I had written at least a thousand murder stories in my time. I was going to write one more. A story that would stand as the tombstone on my career. A story that would make them remember me after I was gone.

The weekend was a blur of alcohol, anger and humiliation as I grappled with a new future that was no future. After briefly sobering up on Saturday morning I opened the file that held my novel in progress and began reading. I soon saw what my ex-wife had seen long ago. What I should have seen long ago. It wasn’t there and I was kidding myself if I thought it was.

The conclusion was that I would have to start from scratch if I was going to go this way, and the thought of that was debilitating. When I took a cab back to the Short Stop to get my car, I ended up staying and closing the place out early Sunday morning, watching the Dodgers lose again and drunkenly telling complete strangers about how fucked up the Times and the whole newspaper business was.

It took me all the way into Monday morning to get cleaned up. I rolled in forty-five minutes late to work after finally getting my car at the Short Stop and I could still smell the alcohol coming out of my pores.

Angela Cook was already sitting at my desk in a chair she had borrowed from one of the empty cubicles. There had been a lot of them since they’d started the buyouts and the layoffs.

“Sorry I’m late, Angela,” I said. “It was kind of a lost weekend. Starting with the party on Friday. You should have come.”

She smiled demurely, like she knew there had been no party, just a one-man wake.

“I got you some coffee but it’s probably cold by now,” she said.

“Thanks.”

I picked up the cup she had gestured to and it had indeed cooled. But the good thing about the Times cafeteria was free refills-at least they hadn’t changed that yet.

“Tell you what,” I said. “Let me go check in with the desk and if nothing’s happening we can go get refills and talk about how you’re going to take over.”

I left her there and walked out of podland and over toward the Metro desk. On the way I stopped at the switchboard. It sat like a lifeguard stand in the middle of the newsroom, built high so that the operators could look out across the vast newsroom and see who was in and able to receive calls. I stepped to the side of the station so one of the operators could look down and see me.

It was Lorene, who had been on duty the Friday before. She raised a finger to tell me to hold. She handled two quick transfers and then pulled one side of her headset off her left ear.

“I don’t have anything for you, Jack,” she said.

“I know. I want to ask about Friday. You transferred a call to me late in the afternoon from a lady named Wanda Sessums. Would there be any record of her phone number? I forgot to ask for it.”

Lorene shoved her headset back in place and handled another call. Then without pulling her ear free she told me she didn’t have the number. She had not written it down at the time and the system only kept an electronic list of the last five hundred calls to come in. It had been more than two days since Wanda Sessums had called for me and the switchboard got close to a thousand calls a day.

Lorene asked if I had called 411 to try to get the number. Sometimes the basic starting point was forgotten. I thanked her and headed on to the desk. I had called information at home and already knew there was no listing for Wanda Sessums.

The city editor at the moment was a woman named Dorothy Fowler. It was one of the most transient jobs at the paper, a position both political and practical and one that seemed to have a revolving door attached to it. Fowler had been a damn good government reporter and was only eight months into trying her hand at commanding the crew of city-side reporters. I wished her well but kind of knew it was impossible for her to succeed, given all the cutbacks on resources and the empty cubicles in the newsroom.

Fowler had a little office in the line of glass but she preferred to be an editor of the people. She was usually at a desk at the head of the formation of desks where all the aces-assistant city editors-sat. This was known as the raft because all the desks were pushed together as if in some sort of flotilla where there was strength in numbers against the sharks.

All city-side reporters were assigned to an ace as the first level of direction and management. My ace was Alan Prendergast, who handled all the cop and court reporters. As such, he had a later shift, usually coming in around noon, because news that came off the law enforcement and justice beats most of the time developed late in the day.