“Hey, kid, how much of the papers money did you blow in those whorehouses?” Shep paused and giggled. “You get that, Bob? How much did he blow?”
Bright looked up from the booth he was in. “Oh, I didn’t actually spend any of the paper’s money on the story, Mr. Carley.”
“Oh, you paid your own dough? Was the nooky that good?”
Bright looked distinctly uncomfortable. “No, no. I didn’t spend any money at all. I didn’t, ah, go all the way at any of those places.”
“Come on, kid. You had a chance to get your ashes hauled on Swift’s dollar and you passed? What are you, queer?”
Suddenly Shep found himself lifted about eight inches off the floor and staring Bright’s bruiser friend in the face.
“Mr. Bright says he didn’t spend any money at them places. That don’t make him no faggot, understand?” He let go and Shep dropped, falling to his knees.
“Hey,” the big man said, looking down at Carley. “Maybe you’re the queer, huh?” He pushed Shep and toppled him on his side, where he remained.
Bright got out of the booth and motioned the bruiser away. “Kenny, cut it out. He was just kidding.”
Bright helped one of the other young reporters lift Shep into a seat. He took the big man over to a corner and spoke quietly but with emphasis. Then he went over to Shep and leaned down. “Hey, I’m sorry, Mr. Carley. My roommate just got a little excited. Let me buy you a beer.”
Carley was so soused he apparently thought he had fallen by himself. He smiled at Bright and nodded. The big man came back to the booth and stuck out his hand.
“Hey, I’m sorry, buddy. I thought you was giving Kirk a hard time, and I figgered a guy has to stand up for his roommie.”
“Mr. Carley, this is Kenny Kehler, my roommate,” Bright said, looking around the group as if an explanation had been demanded. “We’ve been friends since I was a kid, and when I got this job I found out he was working here and had an apartment big enough for two. So, with first-year pay being what it is, I moved in with him.”
Shep nodded in a bewildered way and entered phase three of his usual drinking progression. He passed out.
We were just getting ready to hoist Carley out of the booth and start pumping some coffee into him when Dick Mooniman came in.
“Jesus, what a night,” he said as he signaled for a beer.
“What now?” Claggett asked.
“I been running since eight o’clock. The whorehouse stories got the cops off their asses and they hit all the massage joints. There’s enough women in kimonos down at the lockup to cast a Japanese opera.”
He took a pull out of the bottle. “And something else. About a dozen pissed-off customers got pulled in with the girls, including, for Christ’s sake, both the present and immediate past publishers of that pillar of community morals, the Capital Register & Press.”
“Shiu?”
“Morgan?”
“Both, literally in the flesh, the cops said. They were having a little foursome at the Three Bares when the doors came down. By the time they got to the cop house, one of them got through to Swift, and he was there with bail when they arrived wrapped in sheets.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Well, I came back to the paper and started writing the story. I didn’t know what we were going to do about Shiu and Morgan, but I thought sure we’d give a good splash to the raids.”
“And?”
“Swift came back madder than a bear that got waked up by a New Year’s party. I asked him how much we wanted on the story, and he picked a phone book off the desk and flung it clear across the room.
“’A brief,’ he said. ‘Just write a straight piece saying the police raided the health clubs and arrested a dozen or whatever it was number of women. That’s all.’
“I asked him if we shouldn’t say the raids followed our expose, and he looked at me like he wanted to cry. ‘Just a brief. Bloody policy. We’d be doing it up brown—I can tell you, if I had my way—but we’ve got a publisher who doesn’t read his own paper and didn’t even know we had blown the whistle on his favorite relaxation. Bloody idiot! I don’t care if he fucks everything that moves, but now he’s ruined the best story around this dreary place in weeks. I bloody well won’t forget this.’”
“He stamped into his office and here I am—finished work a lot sooner than I expected.”
Kirk Bright had been listening to this with his mouth open. “I don’t understand, Mr. Mooniman. Does this mean we won’t be following up on my stories?”
Mooniman took a gulp of beer. “It means, kid, what Joe Liebling or somebody said about freedom of the press. It belongs to them that owns one.”
CHAPTER 10
“The primary is coming,” Swift said.
I stood in his office—the chairs were buried under papers, books, and what looked like pizza boxes and hamburger cartons of condemnable age and condition—and wondered what the managing editor had on his mind now. One thing I knew—he didn’t call me over from the statehouse to tell me something he knew I knew.
“I know. I wrote you a memo—about covering the campaign this year.”
Swift poked around in a pile of papers on his desk and with two fingers gingerly extracted my note from between a used paper napkin and a Mighty Mac wrapper.
“You call this a coverage plan? You want to spend a couple of days with each of the candidates and come back and write an… overview? An overview, for Gods sake? What about daily coverage?”
“Well, we’ve always used the wires for that. Fargo said it was silly to send people otit to duplicate what we already were paying them for. And besides, these campaigns charge 150 percent of first class airfare to travel with them. He said Morgan would have a kitten if we spent that kind of money.”
“Bugger Morgan… and Barton too! We’ve got national figures coming into this state for a week, maybe more, and we’re going to give them grown-up newspaper coverage. I want a plan to make some of these twits that have been sneering at us sit up and take notice.
“I don’t imagine we’ve got any budding Theodore Whites around here, Wartovsky, but see if you can find at least three reporters on this staff who know the difference between a Democrat and a doorstop. And start making arrangements for our people to cover these candidates when they start, what is it?… stamping in this state.”
Another surprise. I’d been at the CR&P in two presidential years, and it seemed to me the management always tried to pretend the campaign was taking place in Patagonia, even when our primary was getting top billing in the Eastern papers and on the networks. Now Swift was calling for respectable coverage of a political story that might not have a spot of blood or whiff of sex. Amazing.
Our presidential primary used to be one of the big shows every four years. It was our voters who sent Wendell Willkie back to Wall Street in 1944 and showed that Jack Kennedy could win in the Midwest in 1960, but since then wed pretty much been upstaged by the likes of Iowa, Illinois, and even Nebraska, for God’s sake.
Four years earlier, none of the candidates made big efforts in our state. That may have been connected with the fact that the incumbent vice president was from the neighboring state and passed the word to party leaders that if any of them started playing footsie with the guy who was challenging the president, he would personally see to it that our next interstate highway project went directly through the state Capitol grounds.
In the other party, the old actor tied up our delegates in a hurry when he reminded everyone that he once had made a movie that glorified the state’s greatest football coach. Of such monumental factors are the hard-headed decisions of big time politics made.