He put a smile in his voice before he answered. ‘Mr Howe? Hal Mooney here.’
‘Mr Mooney, I know you’re probably wishing some kind of strange voodoo curse on me for calling you right now, but I want five minutes of your time. Then I’ll let you get back to work.’
‘Five minutes, sir? Okay, shoot.’
‘I want five minutes on Eliza Gunn. Sum her up for me. I’ll time you.’
‘Right now? Are you starting the clock this minute?’ Mooney said and chuckled, although he knew Howe was probably sitting on the other end of the line with a stop watch in his hand.
‘Right now.’
Mooney glanced idly at the clock over his office door, thought for a few seconds and started. ‘One of the best investigative reporters I’ve ever known. She uses it all, whatever it takes. She can be adorable if getting it takes adorable. She can also be serious if it takes serious, or funny if it takes funny, or heart—warming, or cold-blooded, or meaner than a goddamn cobra with tonsillitis, if that’s what it takes. Point is, she gets it. She’s Joe Namath his first year with the Jets. Every throw’s gotta be a winner.
‘The first thing comes to my mind is the cross-eyed tiger. She called it a hunch. I call it instinct, pure instinct, without which a reporter’s a dancer with a broken leg.
‘Thing is, it took me a little while at first, y’know, to see it. At first I figure she’s just cute, a little ditzy. I used her on light stuff.
‘But that tiger story, that was a doozie. The rest of the stations were treating it as a humour piece, y’know, a kicker. I mean, what the hell, how else you gonna treat a story about a cross-eyed tiger named Betsy Ross ho’s getting her eyes uncrossed? So everybody gets stuff on the tiger going into the operating room and the doctor talking about the operation, like that. Then they split.
‘Not her. She hangs in there. I even told her to leave the damn zoo. There was stuff fast-breaking all over town that day.
“I got a hunch,” she says.
“Whaddya mean?” I says.
“You know what a hunch is, for Chrissakes,” she says
‘I feel like a dodo. I got this five-foot, ninety-eight-pound twenty-two-year-old asking me do I know what a hunch is and me in the business — what, twenty years? Almost as long as she is old.
“Look,” I says, “I got shit busting all over the place, I’m the news director, get your ass in the van and get over to” — hell, I don’t even remember where.
‘Now, she’s on staff maybe two, three months at the time, she’s a goddamn receptionist before that, I’m the expert, she’s nothin’ short of an intern, so who’s the boss, besides, what does she know, right?
‘Wrong.
‘She says, “I don’t trust these assholes” — she talks like a longshoreman by the by—and I says, “What assholes?” and she says, “The vets,” and I says, “Isn’t this like three expert tiger doctors they got Out there?,” and she says, “I don’t give a shit if it’s the top vet, he’s got a funny look in his eye. Trust me.”
“Trust me”!
‘I’m looking the Six O’Clock News dead in the eye three hours away and she wants to tie up a camera crew, herself and a van on a hot news day because the tiger doctor has a funny look in his eye.
‘I make a little joke. I says to her, “Not as funny as the look in the tiger’s eye, ho, ho, ho,” and she gets pissed, starts giving me all this jazz about this tiger, how it’s real valuable because it has white under the black stripes inst.ead of yellow and how they’re just doing the operation to make the tiger even more valuable and then the zoo’s gonna sell it to some Arab king for some enormous amount of money and on top of that the vet’s in for some big fee.
‘A tiger, for God’s sakes.
“Get your ass outa there now,” I say s, and she says, I swear to God, she says, “Bullshit!’ And she kills the connection. Not only that, she leaves the damn phone off the hook and I’m ready to kill her and I’m dictating a memo canning her ass and at five-thirty she bombs in the door and the tiger is dead on the operating table and this big-time vet has fucked up royally and the zoo people are freaking out all over the place, and she’s got this hotshot doctor with his balls hanging out trying to get off the hook explaining why the tiger died and all they were trying to do was fix its eyes, and there isn’t another newsman within twenty miles and the next thing I know Cronkite’s people are on the horn looking for a national pickup and we get more phone calls from that one goddamn story, for Chrissakes, than anything I can remember.
‘That lady has instincts. And that’s the name of the game. I have never argued with her since. And she’s never let me down.’
‘She seems very good at finding people,’ Howe said quietly. ‘People who don’t want to be found, that is.’
‘It’s far from the first time. Take Tomatoes Garziola. Just before that mess between Garziola and the Feds blew up. In fact, she kind of fired the first shot in that war. An assistant DA named Flannagan had made some comments at a luncheon about Garziola and everybody was looking for him, except Garziola wasn’t that anxious to be found.
‘But Lizzie decided, by God she was gonna find him, so she pulled his package and was going through the stuff and found a reference to Garziola’s mother. Lo and behold, it’s the old lady’s birthday. So she and a crew head down to Providence, which is where the old lady lives, and Lizzie cruises up to the door, and sure enough, there’s Tomatoes with half a dozen of his gorillas, having dinner.
‘Thing is, she kept calling him Tomatoes to his face. I mean, the last time anybody called Garziola Tomatoes to his face, they floated up under the Atlantic Street pier. Did you see the original tape? Here comes Garziola out of his old lady’s front door with a look on his face would make the whole front line of the Dallas Cowboys wet their pants and he stares down at her and says, “I don’t pick on ladies, okay, particularly they don’t weigh twenty pounds soakin’ wet, but I could make an exception in your case, sister.”
‘She looks up with that fifty-dollar smile, says, “The DA, Flannagan, is making a fool of you, Mr Tomatoes, I just thought you’d like to get your side of the story on the record,” and he starts laughing and he turns around to these four apes behind him, says, “Mr Tomatoes!” and he’s laughing so, of course they all start laughing, too, and then he says, “Whaddya talkin’ about?,” and she says, “Mr Flannagan has publicly accused you of graft and kickbacks and hijacking and even a little murder here and there,” and Garziola looks down at her again and says, “Why, that little son of a bitch, on my mother’s birthday, too,” and she says, real tough like, “Yeah, on your mother’s birthday,” and then without even a breath in between she says, “Why do they call you Tomatoes?,” and the next thing you know, Garziola’s sitting there on his mother’s stoop telling her all about how it was on the docks in the old days when he was getting started and how’ they used to hold up off-loading the produce until the tomatoes were rotten and finally the owners started knuckling under and that’s when they started getting a living wage and that is where the name Tomatoes came from.
‘Forty-five minutes later he’s still talking and then he puts the cork in the bottle and says, “Look, little lady, when it comes to kickbacks and the old payola, the first one’s got his paw out is that little schmuck, Flannagan. You want a story, I’ll give you a story,” and his lawyer’s standing there trying to shush him up and he’s telling everybody get lost and he gives her book, chapter, verse on what turned out to be one of the juiciest scandals in years. I’m not saying she broke the story — I mean, in the long run it all had to come out — but we got it first, and that’s the name of the game. Your papers got most of the mileage out of it, but you saw it first on Channel Six and she’s the one started the river flowing. That time it took adorable.