After I learned the truth about Stephen’s killer, Jack found me at my home just as my girlfriend, Amanda, and
I were packing up. He told me he’d needed a “dialysis of the soul.” He looked good. Healthy. And raring to go to answer the questions that Stephen’s murder just touched upon.
Anyway, that’s what I was doing here early in the morning. I wanted to get here before him. Though we’d worked in the same offices for several years, I’d never had the chance to work side by side with Jack. I was eager to prove what I’d learned, eager to prove that there was someone waiting in the wings to carry on the traditions he’d started. And what better way to show I was ready than by beating the man to his desk on his first day back in the office?
So when I got off on the ninth floor, pushed through the glass doors to the newsroom, rounded the corner to the sea of news desks, I was shocked to see Jack O’Donnell surrounded by our colleagues, looking like a kid at his own birthday party.
He was sitting on his desk, feet on his desk chair, speaking loudly and buoyantly while the other reporters and editors laughed and slapped him on the back. I hadn’t seen Jack with this much energy since, well, ever. And any frustration I felt in getting here late disappeared when
I saw the smile on the old man’s face.
It was like a returning war hero being embraced by his countrymen. While Jack was gone, one of the things I wished I understood better was the newsroom’s opinion of him. While I always held his professional career in the highest regard, there were no doubt others who looked at his departure as something of an embarrassment. Any time a paper’s reporter ends up in the headlines instead of below them, it was considered an affront to the integrity of the establishment. The New York Times went through it with Jayson Blair, and the Gazette had gone through it twice in the last several years: the exposure of
Jack’s alcoholism by Paulina Cole at the Dispatch, and when I was accused of murder. And while the truth about my situation eventually came to light, the harsh reality was that every word in Paulina’s story was true. Granted she handled it with the class and dignity of a five-dollar hooker, but her words touched a nerve because they cut deep.
The stain on my reputation had begun to disappear over time. I didn’t know if Jack’s ever would.
“Henry!” Jack’s voice boomed over the newsroom.
He was waving me over, the reporters around his desk looking in my direction expectantly. I smiled, big and wide, and walked over.
“Jack,” I said, “how’s the first day back?”
“Coffee still sucks, elevator’s still slow, and the receptionist still doesn’t know my name. Just another day at the office, and I’m loving it.”
He was wearing a suit and tie that both looked new.
His beard, usually shaggy, was neat, the gray more evenly spread. The bags beneath his eyes looked to have dissolved, and his movements were sharper, livelier. It was great to see him like this, and though my smile was wide on the outside, it was nothing compared to how I felt inside.
Jonas Levinson, the paper’s science editor, said, “We didn’t know when we’d see you again, old boy. No note, no forwarding address. Who are you, my ex-wife?”
“I guess when you have enough of them,” Jack said,
“you start to inherit their best qualities.” The group laughed.
“Coffee tastes a whole lot better with a sprinkle of
Beam in there,” Frank Rourke said. “I got a bottle at my desk, Jack. Stop by if you need a taste.”
The smile disappeared from Jack’s face. “Hey, Frank?”
“Hey, Jack-O?”
“Why don’t you go back to your desk and slam a drawer on your head a few times.”
Rourke seemed taken aback. “Christ, it was just a joke,
O’Donnell.”
“Just leave. Amazingly you’ve got less tact than brains, and that’s not an easy feat. Go on, git. ”
Rourke walked away, fuming. Jack’s face warmed again, then he turned to me. Speaking to the rest of the crew, he said, “Fellas, would you give me and Henry a minute?”
They all gave Jack a firm handshake, a pat on the back, a hug or two. I could tell Jack hadn’t been hugged a whole lot. He wasn’t sure where to place his hands. Once the crowd had thinned, he motioned for me to pull up a chair. I grabbed one from an empty desk a few rows away and pulled it into his cube. “Sit down,” he said. I obliged.
“It’s great to have you back,” I said. “I wasn’t sure-”
“You’re late,” Jack said. I checked my watch.
“It’s not even ten past eight. You told me to be here at eight-thirty.”
“If a press conference is called for four and you show up at three-thirty, you’ll be sitting in the back row with the reporters from the high school newspapers.”
“I get your point,” I said.
Jack continued. “So far, you’ve made it by on talent and luck. You want to be great at this job, you need to add a spoonful of brains. With the story we’re going to be chasing, there’s no half an hour early. Murderers don’t want for you to be on time. Drug dealers don’t use personal data organizers. When you catch people off guard, that’s when the truth comes out. Never give someone the time to make up a lie.”
“I know how important this is,” I said. “I know that what my brother was killed for goes higher than the assholes who pulled the trigger.”
Jack stared at me. “You don’t know anything, Henry.
You never go into a story ‘knowing’ anything. A good reporter is open to every possibility. If you have on blinders, you miss the bigger picture. You might think there’s a massive conspiracy, but then you look for facts to support your thesis. You may be right about Gaines.
But you don’t know anything yet. So let the picture paint itself for you.”
“Gaines was killed because somebody thought bumping him off was the quickest route to money and power,” I said.
“And they wouldn’t have thought that without a reason.”
“You said there was a connection between Gaines and some company, right?”
“718 Enterprises,” I replied. “I think it’s a shell corporation. I saw a battalion of drug dealers leaving the company’s midtown headquarters, but I didn’t find out what it is or who runs it. Plus my buddy at the NYPD,
Curt Sheffield, told me that five people connected to 718 have been killed over the last few months. 718 is hiding something major, and for some reason its employees have shorter shelf lives than a chicken at KFC. So you think we should start by looking into 718?”
Jack put his thumb to his lip, tapped it as he thought.
Then he shook his head. “You don’t get a story by meeting it head-on. You need to confront the big dogs with facts, not accusations. We need to poke around. Find out who and what exists at the peripherals. We…”
Just then my cell phone rang. I noticed that the red message light was blinking at the voice mail on my desk.
Whoever was calling had tried to reach me at the office and was now calling my cell.
My first thought was Amanda, but she was likely on her way to the office. I took the phone from my pocket; the number on the caller ID made my stomach lurch.
There’s no way he’d be calling this early in the morning unless something had happened. Something bad.
I answered the phone. “Curt?” I said.
“Henry,” Curt Sheffield said. Curt was an officer with the NYPD. A good buddy and dedicated cop. He’d helped me with numerous cases over the last few years, often giving me scoops ahead of other papers because he knew
I’d do the right thing with them. A lot of other news outlets, not that I’d name names, would takes quotes out of context, make officers who stuck their necks out look bad.
The thing you learned in the news business was that the cops needed you almost as badly as you needed them.
If the cops needed to swing public opinion on a certain topic, or if they needed help from the community in catching a perp, they turned to the papers and television anchors. It wasn’t enough for them to come up with a sketch of an alleged rapist-they needed a medium to get the guy’s face in front of millions of people. Curt understood that. He wasn’t looking for fame, or to see his name in the paper. He didn’t have the sense of rebellious pride most sources had. He was just trying to be a good cop.