Fowler had a little office in the line of glass but she preferred to be an editor of the people. She was usually at a desk at the head of the formation of desks where all the aces-assistant city editors-sat. This was known as the raft because all the desks were pushed together as if in some sort of flotilla where there was strength in numbers against the sharks.
All city-side reporters were assigned to an ace as the first level of direction and management. My ace was Alan Prendergast, who handled all the cop and court reporters. As such, he had a later shift, usually coming in around noon, because news that came off the law enforcement and justice beats most of the time developed late in the day.
This meant my first check-in of the day was usually with Dorothy Fowler or the deputy city editor, Michael Warren. I always tried to make it Fowler because she ranked higher and Warren and I never got along. This might have had something to do with the fact that long before I had come to the Times, I had worked for the Rocky Mountain News out of Denver and had encountered Warren and competed with him on a major story. He had acted unethically and for that I could never trust him as an editor.
Dorothy had her eyes glued to a screen and I had to say her name to get her attention. We hadn’t talked since I’d been pink-slipped so she immediately looked up at me with a sympathetic frown you might reserve for someone you just heard had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“Come inside, Jack,” she said.
She stood up and left the raft and headed to her seldom-used office. She sat behind her desk but I stayed standing because I knew this would be quick.
“I just want to say we are really going to miss you around here, Jack.”
I nodded my thanks.
“I am sure Angela will pick up without a blip.”
“She’s very good and she’s hungry, but she doesn’t have the chops. Not yet, at least, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? The newspaper is supposed to be the community’s watchdog and we’re turning it over to the puppies. Think of all the great journalism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The corruption exposed, the public benefit. Where’s that going to come from now with every paper in the country getting shredded? Our government? No way. TV, the blogs? Forget it. My friend who took the buyout in Florida says corruption will be the new growth industry without the papers watching.”
She paused as if to ponder the sad state of things.
“Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m just depressed. Angela is great. She’ll do good work and in three or four years she’ll own that beat the way you own it now. But the point is, between now and then, how many stories will she miss? And how many of them would have never gotten by you?”
I only shrugged. These were questions that mattered to her but no longer to me. In twelve days I was out.
“Well,” she said after a delayed silence. “I’m sorry. I’ve always enjoyed working with you.”
“Well, I still have some time. Maybe I’ll find something really good to go out on.”
She smiled brightly.
“That would be great!”
“Anything happening today that you know of?”
“Nothing big,” Dorothy said. “I saw on the overnote that the police chief is meeting with black leaders to talk about racially targeted crime again. But we’ve done that to death.”
“I’m going to take Angela around Parker Center and I’ll see if we can come up with something.”
“Good.”
A few minutes later Angela Cook and I refilled coffee cups and took a table in the cafeteria. It was on the first floor in the space where the old presses had turned for so many decades before they started printing the paper offsite. The conversation with Angela was stiff. I had met her briefly six months earlier when she was a new hire and Fowler had trotted her around the cubicles, making introductions. But since then I hadn’t worked on a story with her, had lunch or coffee with her, or seen her at one of the watering holes favored by the older denizens of the newsroom.
“Where’d you come from, Angela?”
“ Tampa. I went to the University of Florida.”
“Good school. Journalism?”
“I got my master’s there, yeah.”
“Have you done any cop shop reporting?”
“Before I went back for my master’s I worked two years in St. Pete. I spent a year on cops.”
I drank some coffee and I needed it. My stomach was empty because I hadn’t been able to keep anything down for twenty-four hours.
“ St. Petersburg? What are you talking about there, a few dozen murders a year?”
“If we were lucky.”
She smiled at the irony of it. A crime reporter always wants a good murder to write about. The reporter’s good luck is somebody else’s bad luck.
“Well,” I said. “If we go below four hundred here we’re having a good year. Real good. Los Angeles is the place to be if you want to work crime. If you want to tell murder stories. If you’re just marking time until the next beat comes up, you’re probably not going to like it.”
She shook her head.
“I’m not worried about the next beat. This is what I want. I want to write murder stories. I want to write books about this stuff.”
She sounded sincere. She sounded like me-from a long time ago.
“Good,” I said. “I’m going to take you over to Parker Center to meet some people. Detectives mostly. They’ll help you but only if they trust you. If they don’t trust you, all you’ll get are the press releases.”
“How do I do that, Jack? Make them trust me.”
“You know. Write stories. Be fair, be accurate. You know what to do. Trust is built on performance. The thing to remember is that the cops in this town have an amazing network. The word about a reporter gets around quickly. If you’re fair, they’ll all know it. If you fuck one of them over, they’ll all know that too and they’ll shut your access down everywhere.”
She seemed embarrassed by my profanity. She would have to get used to it, dealing with cops.
“There’s one other thing,” I said. “They have a hidden nobility. The good ones, I mean. And if you can somehow get that into your stories, you will win them over every time. So look for the telling details, the little moments of nobility.”
“Okay, Jack, I will.”
“Then you’ll do all right.”
While we were making the rounds and the introductions in the police headquarters at Parker Center we picked up a nice little murder story in the Open-Unsolved Unit. A twenty-year-old rape and murder of an elderly woman had been cleared when DNA collected from the victim in 1989 was unearthed in case archives and run through the state Department of Justice’s sex crimes data bank. The match was called a cold hit. The DNA collected from the victim belonged to a man currently doing time at Pelican Bay for an attempted rape. The cold case investigators would put together a case and indict the guy before he ever got a chance at parole up there. It wasn’t that flashy, because the bad guy was already behind bars, but it was worth eight inches. People like to read stories that reinforce the idea that bad people don’t always get away. Especially in an economic downturn, when it’s so easy to be cynical.
When we got back to the newsroom I asked Angela to write it up-her first story on the beat-while I tried to run down Wanda Sessums, my angry caller from the Friday before.
Since there was no record of her call to the Times switchboard and a quick check with directory assistance had turned up no listing for Wanda Sessums in any of L.A.’s area codes, I next called Detective Gilbert Walker at the Santa Monica Police Department. He was the lead investigator on the case that resulted in Alonzo Winslow’s arrest in the murder of Denise Babbit. I guess you could say it was a cold call. I had no relationship with Walker, as Santa Monica didn’t come up very often on the news radar. It was a relatively safe beach town between Venice and Malibu that had a pressing homeless problem but not much of a murder problem. The police department investigated only a handful of homicides each year and most of these weren’t newsworthy. More often than not they were body dump cases like Denise Babbit’s. The murder occurs somewhere else-like the south end of L. A.-and the beach cops are left to clean up the mess.