“Yeah, but he’s right that there’s nobody here after we lock up,” Orris said. An odd look passed over his face. “Nobody but the goddamn night watchman and his goddamn dog… his goddamn dog, goddamn it.” Orris headed toward the Capitol basement at a run.
I went on to the pressroom and, after checking with McGrath to make sure the culprit had been identified, tapped out a kicker for my regular weekly statehouse tidbits column:
CASE CLOSED—Capitol police last week solved a nasty little mystery that has been causing high-level consternation for several months. Someone or something had been leaving deposits on the marble floors of the Capitol in the middle of the night. It turned out to be the night watchman’s Doberman, who from now on will be walked outdoors before he goes on patrol with the watchman each night.
Cute, I thought—until the phone rang and Swift asked, “How long has that animal been shitting on our Capitol floors?”
I made the mistake of being flattered that Swift had noticed the item. “Oh, two or three months. The cops didn’t really get excited about it until today when the governor stepped in it.”
“The governor stepped in it? What did he say?”
“Well, I don’t really know. I know lie was mad as hell.
“Wartovsky, I thought yon were one of the few actual reporters on this benighted newspaper. Find out what the governor said. Call him and ask him. Get a quote, you idiot!”
Without thinking what Swift had in mind, I called the governor’s office. It was past five, so it was no surprise that he wasn’t in. When I phoned Swift, it sounded as if he had calmed down. He said, in a tight, cold tone, “If there is no way to reach him tonight, I suppose we’ll have to make do. But I want you to follow up on this. Get a comment tomorrow.”
My surprise came the next morning. Just below the fold on the front page was a two-column headline:
The phantom of the Capitol rotunda, a midnight desecrator who left his “calling card” on the pristine marble floors of the state’s most hallowed building, has been apprehended and is being rehabilitated, police reported late yesterday.
Capitol sources revealed that the perpetrator was guilty of at least three despoliations of the building in the past few months, but until yesterday Chief James McGrath’s police force, composed principally of patronage appointees, had no clue to his identity or his modus operandi.
It was known, however, that the phantom operated only after midnight when the regular police force turns Capitol security over to a (patronage) night watchman, but neither the late-shift police patrol nor the watchman purported to have any idea how or when the dirty deposits were being left in the building.
It was only yesterday morning when Governor Schmid stepped into the most recent desecration of the floor in the rotunda that Chief McGrath and his minions (who axe paid thirty-two percent more than city police) felt impelled to give the investigation of the incidents higher priority.
“The governor really fried Jimmy McGrath’s behind, and he passed the same treatment on to his underlings,” a Capitol source said last night.
Police Lt. Guy Orris, commanding the 4:00 p.m. to midnight shift at the Capitol, made the arrest after receiving a severe tongue-lashing from Chief McGrath, reliable sources said.
Orris, who had no known investigative experience before his appointment, but was involved in the Schmid campaign in the last election, discovered the offender after being aided by the Capital Register & Press Capitol correspondent in winnowing the potential suspects.
The culprit was identified as Donnerwenter, a five-year-old Doberman pinscher owned by Augustus Fingo, the Capitol night watchman. Fingo was understood to be a distant relative of Secretary of State Fred Banner-man.
Sources said that henceforth Donnerwenter would be walked outdoors each night before accompanying Fingo on his postmidnight rounds. The case was closed with red faces all around.
I was flat-out panicked when I read the piece. Who could have done such a thing? Could I go to the Capitol today? Or ever? I leaped for the phone and dialed the paper, intending to reach Grace and fry his ears with my objections to what had been done to my story.
I forgot that none of the regular staff would be on duty at 9 a.m. now that the paper had switched to morning publication. Diana Osky, the feature writer, answered, and frightened by my shouting, switched me to the only news executive on hand—Swift.
“What seems to be the problem, old man?” Swift asked.
“My story!” I yelled. “Somebody took that little item about the dog crapping in the Capitol and turned it into a major production! And it’s full of stuff I never had in my story.”
Swifts voice took on the cold tone of the previous night. “Yes, it is fleshed out somewhat. You barely had enough information in what you reported to sustain a story for the front page. However, we were able to make do with a little research and a few telephone calls.”
“Who’s responsible for this? I won’t be able to show my face in the Capitol.”
The voice went from cold to glacial. “The story was written by Mr. Wilks under my supervision, Mr. Wartovsky. If you have complaints, address them to me.
“And as for not showing your face at the Capitol, I would suggest you get off your bum and out of that pressroom and bring us some printable news for a change. There ought to be four or five good human interest yarns a day around that building and up to now, the only story I’ve seen from you that approached adequacy was the dog piece… and you all but buried that. A good reporter would have interviewed the night watchman—you can be bloody well sure the network telly people already have—and, for God’s sake, you didn’t even think to call the photographer to bring us a shot of the dog, and the place in the rotunda he fouled.
“A rum piece of work, Mr. Wartovsky. You can start today to recover from it by doing a follow-up on the dog story… and I want it to have something from the governor.” Swift slammed the phone down.
Scared? I hadn’t popped sweat like that since my first week on a small town paper upstate when the high school football coach got killed in an auto accident. The word came in while I was in the office alone, and I couldn’t even remember the guy’s first name and didn’t have a clue on how to even start getting a story together. It came to me that the easy days were over at the Register & Press, and I was entering the new era with my name at the top of the management’s shit list.
I got dressed and drove to the Capitol, where I got lucky and didn’t run into either Orris or McGrath. Joe Mosser, the cop who was stationed at the parking lot (and often was somewhere else drinking coffee or propositioning clerk-typists), was on duty when I pulled in. As I stopped at his guard shack, he grinned and said, “Oh, welcome, Mr. Wartovsky. Your parking place awaits, Mr. Wartovsky. You will be interested to know, Mr. Wartovsky, that your bitch about the parking got me a royal chewing out. But that was before he saw your story this morning. From what I’ve heard on the radio today, you better not so much as drop a cigarette butt in the Capitol. In fact, don’t drop one in the parking lot, either. Littering the Capitol grounds is a fifty-dollar rap, pal.”
In the pressroom, the card players paused when I came in but went back to their game without the usual hellos. Lew Fraser came up wearing a worried look and perched on my desk.
“Wes says you’re cut off from any goodies he has anything to say about. Says anybody who stoops to a cheap needle job to make front page isn’t worthy of the fellowship of serious Capitol reporters.”