Mooniman and I left, driving back to the paper in his car. Swift was at the city desk with Grace.
“All right, Mooniman, get cracking. Claggett is phoning Washington for more details on this bloke, and he’ll give you notes. You start writing and don’t spare the color. Put some pepper in it, old boy.”
Swift told me to get Liz’s pictures, which were drying in the darkroom, and write some captions. “We’re going to take the whole front page for this. The girl’s pictures are damn good, so we’re going to run them big, but keep the captions simple.”
Everybody went to work and Swift hopped from Mooniman to Grace to Claggett to me, prodding us to hurry. When he found out about the little old lady who fingered Barkis, he sent Judy Teach and Liz out to interview her.
(Whine came back in the midst of all the activity to learn he had missed the best local story in years, while he was out photographing a cooking class. “Tandee’s luck,” he said. “I’ll be out shooting a wedding when a plane crashes into the Capitol dome.”)
Finally, the story went into the computer and the photos were sent off to the camera room. Swift sat down to lay out the front page and compose the headlines.
It was the first time I had seen him in action. The layout didn’t take long as he swiftly blocked out the space for the photos, the headlines, and the copy. Then he slumped at the desk staring vacantly at Grace. He pawed at the printout of the copy, chewed on a copy pencil, and then suddenly sat bolt upright with a wicked grin on his face.
He began scribbling large block letters on a sheet of ropy-paper. Finished in minutes, he handed the paper to Grace and said, “This is the banner. Seventy-two point. The rest is forty-eight point, decked below the big one. Get them going in the shop.”
I just got a glance at the sheet. It said:
COPS NAB CANNIBAL DESPERADO
NORRIS THE BITER’ BARKIS CAPTURED IN LOCAL STORE
’MOST WANTED’ FUGITIVE SINKS TEETH INTO THREE OFFICERS
Swift turned to Mooniman. “Now, get your arse back to the jail and tell that tinhorn chief we demand to see the prisoner. I want an interview.”
Mooniman started to get up. Swift reached out and took his arm. “Oh, and take this new kid Bright with you. I want him to see how a good reporter works.”
Mooniman smiled and waved at Kirk Bright, a young reporter who had just started with the paper that week. They left together.
Mooniman told me later what happened when they got to the jail. Gib told them that Barkis was still raising hell and wouldn’t let anyone get near, his cell without beginning to shriek and curse. Mooniman finally talked the chief into at least letting him and Bright take a look at Barkis to see if he’d talk to them.
Barkis went into a fit when the chief walked into the cell block and screamed obscenities at Mooniman. But when he saw young Bright, Barkis suddenly quieted down, looking almost scared. Mooniman asked if they could talk to him and Barkis—acting like a lamb who has just been asked to dance by the wolf—agreed with no argument.
“I’ll talk to him,” he said, nodding at Bright. Mooniman said he didn’t know what had happened, but he wasn’t going to push it. He let the cub ask the questions.
The interview was a dandy. Barkis acknowledged he was the man the cops had been looking for, but when young Bright asked him about his penchant for chomping hunks of meat out of people he took a dislike to, the little guy got indignant.
“Listen, I ain’t no bruiser and where I grew up a kid had to use whatever he had. So I used my teeth. I found out a long time ago a good chomp and a growl makes the biggest bastards back off. But this business about me tearing meat out of people all the time is a lot of crap the cops put out to make themselves look like they captured some kind of wild man from Borneo or something.”
Barkis got an injured look on his face.
“I may bite, damn it, but I never swallow.”
Swift held the paper to get the interview in. He gave Mooniman the main story byline and put Bright’s name on the interview.
After the paper was in, the usual crowd repaired to the Next Door to hash over the story. Kirk Bright had gone over earlier to celebrate his first byline and came over to buy us a round when we arrived.
Bright was sitting with us, his back to the door, when Sanders arrived. I introduced him around and when Bright turned to shake hands, Sanders started like he had been poked with a stick.
Sanders put his hand on my shoulder. “Bob, can I speak with you for a moment?”
We stepped over to the bar and Sanders whispered, “That kid. Where’d he come from?”
“A new boy,” I said. “I think I heard somebody say he was an Ivy Leaguer come to make his way in the gritty world of small town newspapering. He did pretty well his first time out of the box, I hear.” I told him what Mooniman had said about the interview.
“Jesus,” Sanders said. “Listen, you-all got back issues over at the paper?” When I said we did, Sanders pulled me out of the bar and back to the CR&P.
In the dusty file room on the third floor, he said, “Find 1957. November.” I rooted in the stacks and found the month he wanted.
Sanders flipped the yellowing pages and finally came to what he wanted.
“Here,” he said, “look at this.”
On the front page of the paper was a large group photograph of half a dozen men of varying ages standing on a road in some kind of country setting. The paper was a little yellowed around the edges, but the bound volume hadn’t been handled much and the print and the photograph was still clear.
Sanders pointed at a young, good-looking man with thick dark hair who was the spitting image of Kirk Bright.
“That picture was taken by the New York state police when they rousted the mob at the Appalachian meeting in 1957. The crime summit, we called it.”
“Who’s the guy that looks like Bright?”
“The midwestern delegate, a young but up-and-coming button man named Clean Gene Bright. A very mean hombre in those days.
“It doesn’t surprise me tfcat Barkis got cooperative when he saw the kid. After the knocking around he took, he probably thought at first he was looking at the father. And nobody in his line of work ever gave Clean Gene an argument.”
Sanders closed the big book.
“Lookee here, Bob. I told you I didn’t really have anything solid to go on, and I still don’t. We don’t even know for sure this kid is Gene Bright’s son. It’s purely circumstantial, but it’d be the damn coincidence of the century if he ain’t kin to Gene. That’s something I think I can check. And even if he is related, it’s also circumstantial. But this is a fact: When the mob goes into some new venture, straight or crooked, they almost always have someone on the spot to keep an eye on the investment.”
Sanders looked thoughtful. “There’s another possibility, too. A lot of the older guys don’t want their kids in the rackets. They send them to college to be doctors, lawyers, business majors… maybe newspaper men. This young fellow might not know if his father is involved in the paper, even if his old man smoothed the way for him to get the job. I don’t know, but I sure as hell am going to try to find out… and I sure as hell wish you could see your way clear to help.”
I didn’t really need the sales talk. The resemblance between young Kirk Bright and the man in the twenty-five-year-old photograph had made up my mind for me.
“I’m in, Frank.”
CHAPTER 9
Frank and his kids finished a week of observing the Capital Register & Press and headed back to the university—minus one of their number. Swift may have been suspicious of Sanders, but he either didn’t make the connection between Frank and Liz or didn’t think she would be a problem. He definitely liked the work she did on the Barkis story—enough to offer her a job as Whines assistant.