I cut Goodwin off.
“Look, Don, I’ve got no comment and I need to go. I’ve got another call.”
I pushed the button before he could take a third swing at getting me to discuss my employment situation.
“This is Jack McEvoy,” I said after switching over.
Silence.
“Hello, this is Jack McEvoy. How can I help you?”
Call me biased but I immediately identified the person who replied as female, black and uneducated.
“McEvoy? When you goin’ to tell the truth, McEvoy?”
“Who is this?”
“You tellin’ lies, McEvoy, in your paper.”
I wished it was my paper.
“Ma’am, if you want to tell me who you are and what your complaint is about, I’ll listen. Otherwise, I’ m-”
“They now sayin’ Mizo is’n adult and what kinda shit is that? He did’n kill no whore.”
Immediately I knew it was one of those calls. Those calls on behalf of the “innocent.” The mother or girlfriend who had to tell me how wrong my story was. I got them all the time but not for too much longer. I resigned myself to handling this call as quickly and politely as possible.
“Who is Mizo?”
“Zo. My Zo. My son, Alonzo. He ain’ guilty a nothin’ and he ain’t no adult.”
I knew that was what she was going to say. They are never guilty. No one calls you up to say you got it right or the police got it right and their son or their husband or their boyfriend is guilty of the charges. No one calls you from jail to tell you they did it. Everybody is innocent. The only thing I didn’t understand about the call was the name. I hadn’t written about anybody named Alonzo-I would have remembered.
“Ma’am, do you have the right person here? I don’t think I wrote about Alonzo.”
“Sure you did. I got your name right here. You said he stuffed her in the trunk and that’s some motherfuckin’ shit right there.”
Then it came together. The trunk murder from last week. It was a six-inch short because nobody on the desk was all that interested. Juvenile drug dealer strangles one of his customers and puts her body in the trunk of her own car. It was a black-on-white crime but still the desk didn’t care, because the victim was a drug user. Both she and her killer were marginalized by the paper. You start cruising down to South L.A. to buy heroin or rock cocaine and what happens happens. You won’t get any sympathy from the gray lady on Spring Street. There isn’t much space in the paper for that. Six inches inside is all you’re worth and all you get.
I realized I didn’t know the name Alonzo because I had never been given it in the first place. The suspect was sixteen years old and the cops didn’t give out the names of arrested juveniles.
I flipped through the stack of newspapers on the right side of my desk until I found the Metro section from two Tuesdays back. I opened it to page four and looked at the story. It wasn’t long enough to carry a byline. But the desk had put my name as a tagline at the bottom. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten the call. Lucky me.
“Alonzo is your son,” I said. “And he was arrested two Sundays ago for the murder of Denise Babbit, is that correct?”
“I told you that is motherfucking bullshit.”
“Yes, but that’s the story we’re talking about. Right?”
“That’s right, and when are you goin’ to write about the truth?”
“The truth being that your son is innocent.”
“That’s right. You got it wrong and now they say he’s going to be tried as an adult and he only sixteen years old. How can they do that to a boy?”
“What is Alonzo’s last name?”
“Winslow.”
“Alonzo Winslow. And you are Mrs. Winslow?”
“No, I am not,” she said indignantly. “You goin’ put my name in the paper now with a mess a lies?”
“No, ma’am. I just want to know who I am talking to, that’s all.”
“Wanda Sessums. I don’t want my name in no paper. I want you to write the truth is all. You ruin his reputation calling him a murderer like that.”
Reputation was a hot-button word when it came to redressing wrongs committed by a newspaper, but I almost laughed as I scanned the story I had written.
“I said he was arrested for the murder, Mrs. Sessums. That is not a lie. That is accurate.”
“He arrested but he didn’ do it. The boy wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Police said he had an arrest record going back to twelve years old for selling drugs. Is that a lie, too?”
“He on the corners, yeah, but that don’t mean he go an’ kill nobody. They pinnin’ a rap on him and you jes’ along for the ride with your eyes closed nice and tight.”
“The police said that he confessed to killing the woman and putting her body in the trunk.”
“That’s a damn lie! He did no such thing.”
I didn’t know if she was referring to the murder or the confession but it didn’t matter. I had to get off. I looked at my screen and saw I had six e-mails waiting. They had all come in since I had walked out of Kramer’s office. The digital vultures were circling. I wanted to end this call and pass it and everything else off to Angela Cook. Let her deal with all the crazy and misinformed and ignorant callers. Let her have it all.
“Okay, Mrs. Winslow, I’ ll-”
“It’s Sessums, I told you! You see how you gettin’ things wrong all a time?”
She had me there. I paused for a moment before speaking.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sessums. I’ve taken some notes here and I will look into this and if there is something I can write about, then I will certainly call you. Meantime, best of luck to you and-”
“No, you won’t.”
“I won’t what?”
“You won’t call me.”
“I said I would call you if I-”
“You didn’t even ask me for my number! You don’ care. You just a bullshit motherfucker like the rest a them and my boy goes to prison for somethin’ he dint do.”
She hung up on me. I sat motionless for a moment, thinking about what she had said about me, then tossed the Metro section back on the stack. I looked down at the notebook in front of my keyboard. I hadn’t taken any notes and that supposedly ignorant woman had me pegged on that, too.
I leaned back in my chair and studied the contents of my cubicle. A desk, a computer, a phone and two shelves stacked with files, notebooks and newspapers. A red leather-bound dictionary so old and well used that the Webster’s had been worn off its spine. My mother had given it to me when I told her I wanted to be a writer.
It was all I really had left after twenty years in journalism. All I would take with me at the end of the two weeks that had any meaning was that dictionary.
“Hi, Jack.”
I turned from my reverie to look up at the lovely face of Angela Cook. I didn’t know her but I knew her: a fresh hire from a top-flight school. She was what they call a mojo-a mobile journalist nimbly able to file from the field via any electronic means. She could file text and photos for the website or paper, or video and audio for television and radio partners. She was trained to do it all but in practice she was still as green as can be. She was probably being paid $500 a week less than me, and in today’s newspaper economy that made her a greater value to the company. Never mind the stories that would be missed because she had no sources. Never mind how many times she would be set up and manipulated by the police brass, who knew an opportunity when they saw it.
She was probably a short-timer anyway. She’d get a few years’ experience, get some decent bylines, and move on to bigger things, law school or politics, maybe a job in TV. But Larry Bernard was right. She was a beauty, with blond hair over green eyes and full lips. The cops were going to love seeing her around headquarters. It would take no more than a week before they forgot about me.
“Hi, Angela.”
“Mr. Kramer said I should come over.”