Chick, the snoop, grateful to Martin for introducing him to Evelyn Hurley, the love of his life, whom he is incapable of marrying. Chick will reciprocate the favor as long as love lasts.
“They probably don’t want any busybodies monitoring their moves and spreading the word all over town. Anything else going on?”
“People coming in here know something’s up but they don’t know what.”
“Just keep what you know under your hat, Chickie, for Charlie’s sake as well as your own. My guess is they’re afraid for his life. And keep me posted.”
Martin called Walter Bradley, the Albany police chief.
“Walter, I hear the phones are out on Colonie Street.”
“What’s that to me? Call the phone company.”
“We’ve been told, Walter, that something happened to Charlie McCall. I figured you’d know about it.”
“Charlie? I don’t know anything about that at all. I’m sure Patsy’d tell me if something was going on. I talk to Patsy every morning.”
“I talked to him myself just a while ago, Walter. And you say there’s nothing new? No kidnapping for instance?”
“No, no, no, no kidnapping, for chrissake, Martin. No kidnapping, nothing. Nothing at all. Everything’s quiet and let’s keep it that way.”
“You get any other calls about Charlie?”
“No, goddamn it, no. I said nothing’s going on and that’s all there is to it. Now I’m busy, Martin.”
“I’ll talk to you later, Walter.”
In minutes Martin’s phone rang again, Freddie Dunsbach of the United Press.
“Martin, we’ve had a tip Patsy McCall’s nephew was kidnapped.”
“Is that so?”
“It’s so and you know it.”
“Who said I know it?”
“I called Patsy. He denied it and then said to call you.”
“Me? Why me?”
“I thought you could tell me that. Right now we’ve got an eight-hour jump on you, Martin, or are you putting out an extra? You can’t keep a story like this all to yourself.”
“There’s no story, Freddie.”
“You really haven’t heard about it?”
“I’ve heard a wild rumor, but we don’t print rumors.”
“Since when?”
“Blow it out your ass, Fred.” And Martin hung up. The phone rang right back.
“Martin, I’m sorry. That was a joke.”
“I accept your groveling apology. What do you want?”
“Why did Patsy tell me to call you?”
“Damned if I know. Maybe to get rid of you.”
“I think we’re going with the rumor, as an editor’s advisory. Our source is a good one.”
“That’s a bad idea.”
“We can’t sit on it.”
“You can if it means Charlie’s life.”
“This is too big. Hell, this is national.”
Martin snorted. Freddie Dunsbach, boy bureau chief. Arrogant yokel.
“It’s all of that. But let me ask you. How long’ve you been in this town?”
“Almost a year.”
“Then you ought to know that if the McCalls are quiet on this thing, and the police are quiet, there’s one hell of a reason. Patsy must’ve sent you to me because I told him I wouldn’t print any rumors. I see the significance escapes you, but Patsy’s concern is obviously for the safety of Charlie, if Charlie has in fact been kidnapped, which is really not provable if nobody admits it.”
“Does he expect us to bury our heads and ignore the story?”
“What Patsy expects is known only to the deity, but I know what I’d expect if I broke this story and Charlie was murdered because of it. Would you know what to expect in a case like that?”
Freddie was silent.
“Freddie, would you?”
“You’re talking about reprisals for reporting the news.”
“You ever hear about the time Bindy McCall beat a man half to death for insulting his wife? What do you suppose he’d do to somebody who caused the death of his only son? The only child in the whole McCall family.”
“You can’t run a news organization on that basis.”
“Maybe you can’t. Maybe a five-minute beat — which is about all you’d get since we’d put it on the I.N.S. wire as soon as the word was out — is worth Charlie’s life. Kidnappers are nasty bastards. You know what happened to Lindbergh’s kid, don’t you? And he was just a baby who couldn’t recognize anybody.”
“Yeah, there’s something in that.”
“There’s more than you think. We could’ve had an extra out an hour ago with the rumor. But who the hell wins that kind of game?”
“I see, but—”
“Listen, Fred, I don’t run the show here. You talk to Emory when he comes in. He’ll be calling the shots for us and I think I know what he’s going to do, which is nothing at all until there’s a mighty good reason to print something.”
“It’s going to be all over the world in a couple of hours.”
“Not unless you send it.”
“I’ll talk to Emory.”
“You do that.”
Martin dialed Patsy, and the great gravelbox answered, again on the first ring.
“Are you sending people to me for a reason, Patsy?”
“You’ll keep ’em quiet.”
“Hey, this thing is already spreading all over town. Some of these birds don’t give a damn about anything but news. They’ll blow it wide open unless they’re convinced there’s a hell of a good reason not to.”
Silence.
“Call Max at the office in five minutes.”
In five minutes precisely Martin called Max Rosen, law partner to Matt McCall.
“The story is this, Martin,” Max said. “I answered a call here forty-five minutes ago. A man’s voice told me to tell Patsy and Matt they’d picked up their nephew and wanted a quarter of a million ransom, a ridiculous figure. Half an hour ago we had a letter from them, with Charlie’s signature, saying the same thing. They said if we told the police or put out any publicity that they’d kill Charlie. Patsy wants you to inform the rest of the press about this. He won’t talk to anyone but you, and neither will I, nor anyone else in the family. We’re not telling Chief Bradley much of anything, so don’t bother him anymore. I don’t need to tell you what this means, do I, Martin, this confidence in you?”
“No need.”
“When there’s something to be said it will be said to you, provided you can convince the rest of the press to preserve silence.”
“I’ll do what I can, Max. But it’s quite a big world out here. Full of nosy, irresponsible newspapermen.”
“The family knows that.”
“Do they also know I don’t work miracles for a living?”
“I think they presume you do now.”
Emory Jones’s hair was white, with vague, yellowish implications that he might once have been the fair-haired boy of somebody, a mother perhaps, somewhere. He said, whenever the whiteness of his hair arose for discussion, that peabrained reporters who didn’t know the doughnut from the hole had given it to him prematurely. For years he had put up with them, he argued, because he had a basically sacrificial nature. He outlasted almost all of them, he argued further, because he had the forbearance of Jesus Christ in the face of the drooling, foaming, dementia praecox activity that passed for reporting on his one and only newspaper. The noted cry: “That son of a bitch doesn’t know the goddamn doughnut from the goddamn hole!” emanating from editor Jones’s cubicle, meant a short professional life for somebody.
Martin Daugherty placed Emory in this context as he spotted the white hair, saw Emory rumbling across the crooked, paintless, freshly swept wooden floor of the city room. Here he came: pear-shaped, bottom-heavy, sits too much, unhealthy fear of exercise in the man, choler rising, executorially preempted by Martin’s pledge, unspeakably happy at the unfortunate turn of events that had already boiled his creative fluids, which fluids, Martin could see, were percolating irrationally in his eyeballs.