I had just picked up the phone to call Preacher Treacher, as he was informally known by his flock as well as the local media, when I felt a presence hovering over me and looked up to see Alan Prendergast.
“Didn’t you get my message?” he asked.
“No, I just got back and wanted to call Preacher Treacher before everybody else did. What’s up?”
“I wanted to talk about your story.”
“Didn’t you get the budget line I sent? Let me make this call real quick and then I might have more to add to it.”
“Not today’s story, Jack. Cook’s already putting it together. I want to hear about your long-term story. We have the futures meeting in ten minutes.”
“Wait a minute. What do you mean Cook’s already putting today’s story together?”
“She’s writing it up. She came back from the press conference and said you were working together on it. She already called Treacher, too. Got good stuff.”
I held back on telling him that Cook and I weren’t supposed to be working together on it. It was my story and I’d told her so.
“So whadaya got, Jack? It’s related to today’s thing, right?”
“Sort of, yeah.”
I was still stunned by Cook’s move. Competition within the news-room is common. I just hadn’t expected her to be so bold as to lie her way onto a story.
“Jack? I don’t have much time.”
“Uh, right. Yeah, it’s about the murder of Denise Babbit-but from the killer’s angle. It’s about how sixteen-year-old Alonzo Winslow came to be charged with murder.”
Prendo nodded.
“You have the goods?”
By “the goods,” I knew he was asking if I had direct access. He wouldn’t be interested in a story with police said used as attribution everywhere. He wouldn’t want to see the word allegedly anywhere near this piece if he was going to try to give it a good ride on the futures budget. He wanted a crime feature, a story that went behind the basic news everybody already had and rocked the reader’s world with gritty reality. He wanted breadth and depth, the hallmark features of any Times story.
“I have a direct line in. I’ve got the kid’s grandmother and his lawyer, and I’m probably going to see the kid tomorrow.”
I pointed to the freshly printed stack of documents on my desk.
“And that’s the pot of gold. His nine-hundred-page confession. I shouldn’t have it but I do. And nobody else will get it.”
Prendo nodded with approval and I could tell he was thinking, trying to come up with a way to sell the story in the meeting or make it better. He backed out of the cubicle, grabbed a nearby chair and pulled it over.
“I’ve got an idea, Jack,” he said as he sat down and leaned toward me.
He was using my name too much and the leaning into my personal space was uncomfortable and seemed completely phony since he had never done it with me before. I didn’t like the way this was going.
“What is it, Alan?”
“What if it wasn’t just about how a boy became a murderer? What if it was also about how a girl became a murder victim?”
I thought about it for a moment and slowly nodded. And that was my mistake, because when you start by saying yes, it becomes hard to put the brakes on and say no.
“It’s just going to take me more time when I split the focus of the story like that.”
“No, it won’t because you won’t have to split your focus. You stay with that kid and give us a kick-ass story. We’ll put Cook on the vic and she’ll cover that angle. Then you, Jack, weave both strands together and we’ve got a column-one story.”
Column one on the front page was reserved each day for the signature story of the paper. The best-written piece, the one with the most impact, the long-term project-if the story was good enough, it went out front, above the fold and in column one. I wondered if Prendergast knew he was taunting me. In seven years with the Times I had never had a column-one story. In more than two thousand days on the beat, I had never come up with the best piece of the day. He was waving the possibility of going out the door with a column-one at me like a big fat carrot.
“Did she give you this idea?”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? Cook.”
“No, man, I just thought of it. Right now. What do you think?”
“I’m wondering who’s going to cover the cop shop while we’re both running with this.”
“Well, you both can trade off on it. Like you’ve been doing. And I can probably get some help from time to time from the GA group. Even if it was just you on this, I couldn’t cut you loose completely, anyway.”
Whenever general assignment reporters were pulled in to work the crime beat, the resulting stories were usually superficial and by the numbers. It wasn’t the way to cover the beat, but what did I care anymore? I had eleven days left and that was it.
I didn’t believe Prendergast for a moment and was not swayed by his column-one overture. But I was smart enough to know that his suggestion-whether truly his or Angela Cook’ s-could lead to a better story. And it had a better chance of doing what I wanted it to do.
“We could call it ‘The Collision,’” I said. “The point where these two-killer and victim-came together and how they got there.”
“Perfect!” Prendergast exclaimed.
He stood up, smiling.
“I’ll wing it in the meeting, but why don’t you and Cook put your heads together and give me something for the budget by the end of the day? I’m going to tell them you’ll turn the story in by the end of the week.”
I thought about that. It was not a lot of time but it was doable, and I knew I could get more days if needed.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “I gotta go.”
He headed on to his meeting. In a carefully worded e-mail I invited Angela to meet me in the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. I gave no indication that I was upset with or suspicious of her. She responded immediately, saying she would meet me there in fifteen minutes.
Now that I was free of the daily story and had fifteen minutes to fill, I pulled the stack back over to the center of the desk and started reading the confession of Alonzo Winslow.
The interview was conducted by the lead detectives Gilbert Walker and William Grady at the Santa Monica Police Department beginning at eleven A.M., Sunday, April 26, about three hours after Winslow had been taken into custody. The transcript was in Q &A format with very little description added. It was easy and fast to read, the questions and answers mostly short at first. Back and forth like Ping-Pong.
They began by reading Winslow his rights and having the sixteen-year-old acknowledge that he understood them. Then they went through a series of questions employed at the start of interviews with juveniles. These were designed to elicit his knowledge of right and wrong. Once that was established, Winslow became fair game.
For his part, Winslow fell victim to ego and the oldest flaw in the human book. He thought he could outsmart them. He thought he could talk his way out of it and maybe pick up some inside information about their investigation. So he readily agreed to talk to them-what innocent kid wouldn’t?-and they played him like a three-string bass guitar. Dum-de-dum-de-dumb. Getting every implausible explanation and outright lie on record.
I breezed through the first two hundred pages, skipping page after page of Winslow’s denials of knowing anything or seeing anything pertaining to Denise Babbit’s murder. Then, in very casual conversation, the detectives turned the questions toward Winslow’s whereabouts on the night in question, obviously trying to get either facts or lies on the record, because either way they would be helpful to the case-a fact was a marker that could help them navigate through the interview; a lie could be used like a club on Winslow when revealed.
Winslow told them that he was at home sleeping and his “moms”-Wanda Sessums-could vouch for him. He continually denied any knowledge of Denise Babbit, repeatedly rejected knowing her or anything about her abduction and murder. He held up like a rock, but then on page 305 the detectives started lying to him and setting traps.