The neighborhood where Hank Stransky had lived was one of those west of Glendale that had sprung up in the boom following World War II. The house was a plain frame bungalo that had been enhanced with shrubbery, an add-on room, a new brick chimney, and a covered patio out in the back with a fishpond and built-in barbecue.
Pauline Stransky, wearing an outdated print dress and looking weary, answered the door. Jimbo glanced over, and Corey knew what he was thinking. No forty-inch chest.
Corey identified himself and the photographer. Mrs. Stransky led them inside with an air of resignation.
The living room — or front room, as Pauline Stransky called it — was crammed with fat, comfortable furniture, knickknack shelves, and framed photographs of people in stiff studio poses. Handwoven rag rugs were spaced strategically in spots where the carpet would get the most wear.
The widow was a tall, spare woman with a strong-looking body. She wore her graying hair pulled back and knotted. Her manner was calm as she sat on the sofa facing Corey, but red rims around her eyes showed much recent crying. The Stransky boys, ages eight and nine, sat restlessly alongside their mother. They ignored Corey, concentrating on Jimbo Tattinger, who was putting on a show for them, hopping around and shooting up film as if he were from People magazine.
“You have a nice house here, Mrs. Stransky,” Corey said. “Comfortable.”
“Hank did a lot of the work himself.”
“I can see that.” Corey coughed and took out a ball-point pen. “Would you mind talking a little about your husband?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What kind of a man he was. What you liked to do together. How he was with the boys.”
Pauline Stransky began to talk. Slowly at first, then with more emotion as her eyes drifted away to memories. Hank Stransky was your good, solid, salt-of-the-earth guy next door. He worked hard, always provided for the wife and kids. Maybe he drank a little too much sometimes, but didn’t everybody? He never got abusive. He liked to watch sports on TV, he liked to hunt, and he liked building things. In short, Hank Stransky was the kind of a man who would put the Herald’s readers to sleep in a minute or send them running to the television set. As a story, he was a zero.
As soon as he decently could, Corey broke into the widow’s reminiscences. “Uh, Mrs. Stransky, would it bother you to talk about last Friday?”
It took her a moment to return to the present. “I guess not,” she said. “I’ve talked about it enough that it don’t hurt so much anymore.”
“I’ll try and make it short,” Corey said.
Mrs. Stransky turned to the two boys, who were squirming uncomfortably on the sofa. “You can go on out and play if you want to.”
They bounced up eagerly and hurried out the door. Jimbo shot them leaving, then sagged into a chair.
“There ain’t — isn’t — much I can tell you that I haven’t already told the others,” she said. “Hank went out Friday night after supper. Said he was going down by Vic’s. That’s the last time I saw him.”
“Did he often go out alone?”
“Sure. Sometimes I’d go with him, but mostly he liked to watch the sports on TV and kid around with the other guys at Vic’s. I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance to stay home and watch my own shows.”
“Did you notice anything … different about him when he went out last Friday?”
“He was same as always except he didn’t eat very good. Said he had some kind of headache. I guess I snoozed off watching TV, and the next thing I knew, the cops came to the door and told me Hank was dead.”
Corey scribbled on the folded copy paper. “You say he had a headache.”
“That’s right. He didn’t make much of it, but it wasn’t like Hank to complain. Last week I thought he might be coming down with the grippe, but he went to work, anyway, and I guess it wasn’t anything.”
“He worked for the highway department, didn’t he?” Corey said.
“That’s right. Construction. That was his business. Hank could’ve had inside work, but he always said he’d go crazy with a desk job.”
Her mouth twitched as the irony hit her. Corey went on quickly.
“Was there anything unusual about the job Mr. Stransky was working on at the time?”
She looked at him with a sad smile. “It sounds funny to hear you say ‘Mr. Stransky.’ I think he’d rather you called him Hank. Everybody did.”
Corey nodded. “Hank, then.”
“It was just a job like the rest. Down in South Milwaukee. Breaking up the old street, putting in a new one. At least that let him get home earlier than the week before. Then he was working up north of Appleton on the highway there. Didn’t get home till after seven sometimes. Thank goodness it only lasted a week.”
They talked for another fifteen minutes during which Corey’s spirits sagged steadily. There appeared to be nothing about Hank Stransky or his behavior prior to the violent end of his life that was in any way newsworthy. A little inside filler was all he would get out of this. Too bad Hank Stransky couldn’t have been a murderous maniac. Or at least a wife beater.
Corey seized the first opportunity to say good-bye to the widow. He woke up Jimbo, who had dozed off soon after the boys went outside, and left the house.
On the drive back to the Herald building Jimbo said, “Tell me again how we’re going to win the Pulitzer Prize with this story.”
“It’s not dead yet.”
“The only way it runs another day is if Hank Stransky gets up out of the coffin and takes a bite out of somebody.”
“You’re a million laughs.”
Jimbo hefted the camera, which was filled with exposed film. “What do you want me to do with these?”
“Don’t feed me a straight line like that,” Corey said.
“Seriously. I got a boxful of pictures of nice people in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Make a nice family album, but you couldn’t sell ‘em to a Thursday throwaway.”
“You’ve got no complaint. I got you a wire-service pickup on one of the tavern shots, didn’t I?”
“True. But Tri-State News Service ain’t exactly the AP.”
“Jimbo, in this world you take what you can get.”
The photographer made his eyes go very wide. “Words to live by. Thank you, sire.”
“Stuff it,” Corey said. He drove the rest of the way in silence while Jimbo grinned happily beside him.
Back at his desk Corey attacked the typewriter nonstop for twenty minutes. When he had finished, he ripped out the last sheet, scanned the story he had written on Hank Stransky’s widow, and crumpled it into a ball. After a moment he smoothed out all three pages, cut it to three paragraphs, and dropped it into the Print basket.
Corey leaned back, making the old wooden swivel chair creak. Good-bye, Pulitzer, he thought with a thin-lipped grin. At least he had given it his best shot. He had followed up the story of Stransky’s flip-out with features on each of the eight people who had gotten cut up at the tavern. Not exactly a gold mine. They were all blue-collar types you could find at any tavern in town any night of the week. The widow and the kids added up to a yawn. Stransky’s funeral might be worth a few lines; then it would be old news. The Big Story still eluded him.
On a table behind Corey’s desk was a stack of dailies from across the country that had been mailed to the Herald. He flipped through them idly. Los Angeles had an earthquake reading four point something on the Richter scale. Cuban refugees staged a mini-riot in Miami. There was a bribery scandal in the Texas legislature. A New York cabbie drove into a crowd of pedestrians.