"Why?" Emma asks.
"Have you looked closely at our newspaper lately? Or any of Maggad-Feist's papers? They're all dumbed-down crapola, fluff and gimmicks and graphics. The old man knows he fucked up his legacy by selling out. He's bitter and spiteful and rich enough to play chicken with these bastards."
"He told you all this?" she says uncomfortably.
"In language unfit for publication," I say. "But here's the glorious part, the real reason young Race Maggad took time off from his precious polo practice to visit you. He's determined to make sure MacArthur Polk gets the obituary he wants. Why? Because young Race wants the old man to sell his Maggad-Feist stock back to the company before he dies, or at least leave those instructions for his estate."
Emma stiffens in her seat. "There's been rumors that somebody outside the family is trying to get control of the chain."
"Bingo."
"Who?"
"A couple of foreign outfits. Polk says Maggad is pissing razor blades."
"So what's the old man want from you?"
"Besides a Page One obit that makes him sound like a cross between Ben Bradlee and St. Francis of Assisi, nothing much," I lie smoothly. "Not a damn thing, really."
"We're being used," she says dispiritedly.
"Me more than you, Emma."
"It's basically just two rich guys screwing with each other."
"Basically, yeah," I say.
A gloom settles upon Emma, affecting her normally flawless posture. She understands she's caught up in a squalid little mess that has nothing to do with the practice of honest journalism. The fact I play a crucial role in resolving the situation only deepens her dismay.
"They don't warn you about this stuff in college," she says.
"Who'd believe it, anyway?"
"Right. Not me." Emma stares emptily at her salad.
"On the bright side," I say, "it might be another five years before Old Man Polk finally kicks the bucket. Both of us could be long gone by then."
She raises her eyes. "What?"
"To bigger and better things." A necessary elaboration.
"But in the meantime, you'll have his obit finished and in the can. Please, Jack?"
"Okay. You win."
Damn, I can't help it. I feel sorry for the woman.
We eat in affable silence. Afterwards we order coffee and Emma calls for the check; lunch is on the newspaper. She asks about the Jimmy Stoma story, and I tell her it's tough sledding though I'm making progress. I know better than to mention my scuffle with Jimmy's keyboard player, but I can't pass up the chance to recount the widow's balcony blow job.
Emma lights up. "So you were right—she killed her husband!"
"Very possible. But I still don't have enough to say so."
"Oh, come on. Obviously she had a motive."
"No, Emma, she had a cock in her mouth. That's not necessarily the same thing. Cleo isn't the type to murder for love; Cleo has a career to manage."
A peppermint candy has glommed to one of my dental crowns, impeding speech. Observing my not-so-suave attempts to dislodge it, Emma stifles a laugh.
I hear myself saying, "This is no good. We can't possibly be friends."
"You're right."
"The planks of this relationship are animus, mistrust and a mutual lack of respect."
"As it should be," Emma says playfully.
Enough of this, I'm thinking.
"How many Valiums have you gobbled today?" I ask.
She is floored.
"You took one before you came to lunch, right?"
"No ... yeah, I had to," Emma stammers. "How'd you know?"
I reach across the table and grasp one of her hands. It's impossible to say which of us is more startled.
"You listen," I tell her, "I'm not worth it, and the job's not worth it. We get back to the office, you go straight to the ladies' room and flush mummy's little helpers down the toilet. A drug situation is unacceptable."
"You don't understand, Jack. You can't possibly."
"Take off your shoes. That's an order."
"I will not."
"Emma, I'm counting to three."
"Are you nuts?"
Next thing I know, I'm kneeling under the table and in each hand is one of Emma's taupe pumps. Her bare feet are drawn protectively under her chair, toes curling, but I can see how she's repainted the nails: miniature black-and-white checkerboards!
I pop out grinning from beneath the tablecloth.
"You're going to be fine!" I exclaim.
And Emma slugs me ferociously in the nose.
Emma asked me to steer clear of the newsroom until the bleeding stopped and the swelling went down. So now I'm at home, avoiding the mirror and noodling on my laptop. I see by the pop-up calendar that I've got eight days in which to avoid dying like Oscar Wilde, penniless and scandalized at age forty-six. Someday I must thank Anne for the warning. My forty-seventh birthday is a week from tomorrow. I have $514 in the bank and a nose the size of an eggplant.
My mother will phone on my birthday, but she'll keep it short. She is fed up with being interrogated about my father, but I can't stop thinking about what she sprung on me the last time—that she'd learned of his death "a long time ago" from a newspaper obituary.
Because nothing turned up in the data search I ran at the newsroom, I'm left to rely on my telephone skills and the kindness of strangers. First, I make a list of cities where my mother has lived in the forty-three years since Jack Sr. walked out. In order: Clearwater, Orlando (where I attended high school), Jacksonville (where my mother met my stepfather), Atlanta, Dallas, Tallahassee and, now, Naples. Unless my mother is fudging about the time frame, my old man's death occurred at least two decades ago. That automatically knocks out the last three cities. Twenty years ago, my mother and stepfather were living in Atlanta, so that's where I begin—with a call to the morgue of the Journal-Constitution.
As soon as I identify myself as a brethren journalist, I'm transferred to an efficient-sounding librarian with a honey-buttered Georgia accent. She puts me on hold while she manually searches the paper's old, alphabetized clip files, the stories that predated electronic storage. As I'm waiting, my palms moisten and my heart drums against my sternum and—for one fleeting lucid moment—I consider hanging up. Whether my father croaked at thirty-five or ninety-five shouldn't matter to me; I don't even remember the guy. We had nothing in common except for the name and the blood; any other attachment is illusory, coiled like a blind worm in my imagination.
Yet I don't hang up. When the librarian comes back on the line, she apologetically reports that she cannot find a published obituary for anyone named Jack Tagger, nor any news stories relating to the death of such a person. "It's always possible it was misfiled. I could crosscheck the daily obit pages on microfilm," she offers. "Can you guess at the year?"
"Till the cows come home," I say. "Thanks for trying."
I get the same discouraging results from the Florida Times-Unionin Jacksonville, the Orlando Sentineland the Clearwater Sun.No obits, blotter items, no stories, no Jack Tagger in the clips. I wonder if I've overestimated my mother's integrity. Suppose she invented the bit about seeing my old man's obit in a paper. Suppose she contrived to send me off on some winding, futile quest, just to get me off her back.
If so, I went for the bait like a starved carp. Two hours working the phone and zip to show for it. Serves me right.
I dial her number and Dave, my stepfather, picks up. We engage in innocuous chitchat about the tragic state of his golf game until he gets sidetracked, as he often does, on the subject of Tiger Woods. While acknowledging the young man's phenomenal talent, my stepfather fears that Tiger Woods is inspiring thousands upon thousands of minority youngsters to take up golf, and that some of these youngsters will one day gain entry to my stepfather's beloved country club and commence whupping some white Protestant ass.