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  Lawlor said, “This time next year, one of these papers won’t be publishing.”

  The muscles in McCarthy’s jaw slackened. “I didn’t know we were that close.”

  “The Post is hemorrhaging,” Lawlor went on. “We’re frozen. Can’t hire any more reporters. The Beacon can’t either. It’s just a matter of time before a major artery bursts. Then one of us will stroke out and go dark like The Dallas Times-Herald, The Houston Post, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, or any of the other papers that have given up the ghost this past decade.”

  Lawlor paused to point again. “Harry Plake sits right there in that office in the corner. We aren’t so different, Plake and I. We get up every morning to study each other’s work, to look for any little bit of blood that says we wounded the other. Know why?”

  “No,” McCarthy said.

  Lawlor’s voice became strained. “Because for all our faults, Harry Plake and me, we love our newspapers. Is this the best paper that ever was? Christ sakes, no. The Post’s got its weaknesses like every newspaper. But when The Post is on, it has the faint glow of greatness. Side by side, laid out on the table every day for a month, we make The Beacon look like a perfect piece of shit. Am I right, Ed?”

  “A perfect piece of shit,” Tower said.

  Lawlor turned to McCarthy. “Of all the staff members I could have predicted to lay blood for Harry Plake to see, it wouldn’t have been you.”

  McCarthy swallowed: “I … don’t understand.”

  As if on cue, Tower flipped the folder open and read from two pieces of paper that McCarthy couldn’t make out: “ ‘The families of the Vietnam survivors carry the scars of battle as well. They are the invisible wounded.’

  “And now this one ‘The brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers carry the scars of Vietnam just like the veterans. But their wounds aren’t visible.’ ”

  Tower skipped ahead several paragraphs in McCarthy’s article to read the doctored quotes and then the actual ones from the veterans’ journal. The Editor for Newsroom Operations went on this way until he’d gone over every stolen word.

  “Sound familiar?” Tower asked when he’d finished.

  Dots danced before McCarthy’s eyes. “Covers the same points,” he croaked.

  Lawlor slammed his palm on the desk so hard several books slid off and fell to the floor. “Don’t bullshit me, Gid! I’ve got a built-in detector and you’re reading pure stink.”

  Tower said, “We got a call this morning from Professor Clapper. Said he noticed the similarities between Kraul’s quotes in that journal and the ones you ascribed to her. I just got off the phone with the lady. She says she never spoke to you.”

  The blood that beat at McCarthy’s temples threatened to turn his vision black. Lawlor, the man he respected more than anyone else in this business, was looking at him like he was worse than a street drunk.

  “There are lot of crimes you can commit in journalism,” Lawlor said. “You can tape someone without telling them. You could let the opposition beat you on a story you knew about first, but failed to write. You could name a source you promised would remain anonymous, and you know how I feel about that.

  “But the worst crime you can commit in this business is to take someone else’s work and call it your own. Plagiarism. Intellectual equivalent of armed robbery. And by allowing us to print it, on page one no less, you made everyone who edited that story an accessory after the fact.”

  McCarthy wanted to puke.

  “By all rights, I should fire your ass, right here, right now,” Lawlor continued.

  “I think you should,” Tower said.

  Lawlor said, “But you were a fine reporter. Why did you do it?”

  McCarthy’s throat closed. He fought for air.

  “Why?” the editor roared. McCarthy knew that half the newsroom now watched through the glass. Vultures sniffing fresh carrion.

  His face contorted. “Tina’s children,” he mumbled.

  “Oh, please,” Tower began.

  Lawlor held up his hand. “Give him his say, Ed.”

  Halting, McCarthy laid it all out: how he was bucking deadline, how Professor Clapper wouldn’t speak, how he was exhausted from covering Gentry, how Charley Owens’s effort to stop the adoption proceedings had made him panic. “I knew when I was doing it I was wrong. But I didn’t see another way. I … I feel like I lost my best friend.”

  Lawlor pursed his lips. “You did. You lost your integrity.”

  “Sold your integrity,” Tower said, “to make deadline.”

  The editor-in-chief turned away and closed his eyes. Tower busied himself scribbling on the folder. For McCarthy it was like reliving the sensation of the accident all over again. He felt apart from his body, apart from the pain, floating over the scene, a spectator to disaster.

  Finally Lawlor opened his eyes. “I should fire you for this crime.”

  Tower allowed himself the faintest of smiles.

  “But Tina Rodriguez was a great talent and her death was a tragedy,” Lawlor went on. “I know you love her kids. They deserve someone to love them.”

  Tower made as if to protest, but Lawlor cut him off. “Hear me out on this, Ed.”

  Lawlor turned back to McCarthy. “Don’t get the idea I’m cutting you slack because of that romantic notion. The fact is the stakes are too high right now to let you go. With the war on the brink, I can’t afford to lose another reporter, even if he is a hack.”

  McCarthy shrank from the blow. The editor cleared his throat. He looked at Tower over pressed palms. “Ed, what’s the shittiest beat at this paper?”

  Tower appeared disappointed not to see McCarthy destroyed. Then he saw where Lawlor was going. “We start ’em all on night cops,” he gloated.

  “First job McCarthy had here … what was it … fifteen years ago?” Lawlor asked.

  “That … that’s right,” McCarthy stammered.

  “Well, that’s where you’re going again. No more sexy investigations. Back to that dank little room in the police station. You’ll file crime briefs. Your byline will rarely appear. You won’t lose your paycheck because those kids have been through too much already, because The Post needs every warm body it can get in the trenches. But professionally? I’m sending you to back to hell.”

  McCarthy felt hollow, naked, alone. “It’s fair,” he muttered.

  “It’s more than you deserve,” Tower said.

  “I’m not done yet,” Lawlor said. “You are now going out into that newsroom to confess your crime to your peers. Ed will write an account of your actions as well as your apology to appear in tomorrow’s paper with your picture prominent. Any questions?”

  McCarthy’s fingers and toes went numb. He was a different person now, though in ways he did not yet understand. “No questions,” he said.

  That was three months ago. The morning papers slapped on the front stoop. McCarthy’s dog jumped up in his lap and yapped twice. The reporter woke up, stiff from sleeping in the chair. He looked at his wristwatch: 4:45 A.M.

  McCarthy dragged himself to the front door. He picked up The Post first. He looked for his story, his first step up the ladder out of the abyss.

  He didn’t find his story on page one. That was dominated by national news and a local article announcing that the city’s mayor, Ricardo Portillo, had named Police Chief T. Lawrence Leslie as his campaign director in the race for governor of California.

  McCarthy dropped the A section, the sports, and the features pages. He found his story bannered across the top of the metropolitan news section:

  Seventh Body Found Slain in Desert

  He allowed himself a smile. Three months without a byline, three months of whispers behind his back, three months of shame. This was how redemption began.

  He scanned the piece to make sure the copy editors had not screwed up the facts, then dropped the paper and stripped the rubber band off The Beacon to see what Karen Rivers had written. It was an instinctive act. In a newspaper war, comparing c
overage was the way you counted bodies. McCarthy took one look at the front page and almost fell over. The headline in large bold type read:

  Anti-Cop Hooker Found Dead in Desert

  Only the Lonely …

  “BURKHARDT WASHES HIS HANDS a lot,” LaFontaine said.

  “There’s a reason to go after someone,” McCarthy said.

  They were riding the elevator up to the newsroom just before lunch.

  News said, “I’m telling you, Gid, something about him stinks.”

  “You sure you just weren’t warm for him and he rebuffed you?”

  “If I wanted someone with a ponytail, Gid, I’d date an R.G.”

  “R.G.?”

  “A real girl,” he sniffed. “And even I draw the line somewhere.”

  “If you feel that strong about him, head for every document room in the city. Check what sort of trail he’s left on himself and Cote D’Azure.”

  News sniffed. “Sifting through papers stirs the old asthma, but I suppose you’re right.”

  The elevator door opened. They walked into the newsroom, where the tempo of the day was already mounting. Stepford Editors frantically moved copy through their computer queues. Reporters cradled phones in their necks, barking questions and rapping keyboards. Clerks raced through the maze of desks, dropping books and press releases and the latest from Federal Express.

  “McCarthy!” Claudette X bellowed from behind her desk amid the bedlam. “Where the hell have you been?”

  LaFontaine cowered. “Sorry, Gid. I had a brutal encounter with Madame furioso yesterday afternoon. My delicate constitution cannot bear the thought of another.” He glided off toward his desk.

  McCarthy marched toward the Amazonian editor with his hands held high. “Be calm. Fisk confirmed the story. Rivers got the kid who found the body to talk. He’d looked at her driver’s license. But I got some other stuff, so we’re back in the game.”

  “The Glassholes are cracking themselves over this one,” she grumbled.

  At the desk behind her, Stanley Geld, the city editor, fingered the gold stud in his left ear. “Tower wants your head. Lawlor says you’ve got two strikes now.”

  McCarthy’s stomach rolled over. “It won’t happen again, Stan, I promise. I want this story more than The Beacon does.”

  “You’re only as good as your last story, my friend,” Geld said.

  “Or your next one,” McCarthy countered. “Quote Fisk: ‘I would be remiss in my duties if I did not explore the possibility that police officers were involved in her death.’ ”

  Claudette X whistled. “Fisk said that?”

  “On the record. Said the gravel in her mouth could be taken as a warning to other informants not to talk.”

  “That’s your lead,” Geld said, excited now. “Probably told Rivers the same thing. So we’re even. What else?”

  “I got two sources on the grand jury to spill about her testimony,” McCarthy said. “Click Patrick, one of the cops she named, forced her to have oral sex. Patrick’s supervisor, Diego Blanca, coerced her into an intimate camping trip. Besides that, Gentry’s a street hooker, right? But when I ran her through county records this morning, I find she owns a condo. Bought the place less than three months ago. She put down $30,000.”

  Claudette X screwed up her face. “Where’s a street whore get that kind of cash?”

  “That’s my point,” McCarthy said.

  “Maybe she inherited it,” Geld offered. “What’s her background?”

  “Sketchy. Came out from Tennessee three years ago. Worked in a couple of bars on the strip. Three or four pickups for hooking. I found the family, the brother anyway. Still lives in the little town she came from about sixty miles north of Knoxville. He’s a long-haul trucker, won’t be back until Monday. I’ll call then.”

  A clerk came up and handed Geld some photographs. One was of Gentry standing outside the grand jury room, a pack of journalists around her. Geld said, “She was tall, right? I mean she looks tall here.”

  “Almost model tall. She might have been beautiful if she could have managed it. Her features were hard. I guess you’d call her coldly attractive.”

  Claudette X and Geld exchanged glances. Geld nodded. “Okay, not bad. This should keep Tower away from his ax for a while. Write it.”

  “What’s next?” Claudette X asked. “Go after Blanca and Patrick?”

  “I don’t figure it that way,” McCarthy said. “That’s where Rivers will go because it’s obvious. I’m going to start with Gentry’s condo.”

  Geld let his attention wander to Lobotomy Lane. “You know I can’t cut you free. You want this story, you got to fit it in around your night cops schedule.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Stan!”

  “Beyond our control, Gid,” Claudette X said. “As far as the powers that be are concerned, you’re still the fallen angel.”

  McCarthy puffed and blew. “This stinks.”

  “Life is the pits,” Geld agreed. “Get writing.”

  LaFontaine was busy at his terminal. He always typed up detailed notes on interviews. He always filed them with a date and time in the computer. And he always made hard copies he put in his bulging files. He hit the print key and glanced at McCarthy.

  “I gather your powwow went well?”

  “My ship hasn’t sunk yet,” McCarthy said. “But the Glassholes are looking hard for rats abandoning.”

  “Hang in there,” LaFontaine said. “I’ve come to believe that surviving is about as good as it gets in this business.”

  McCarthy nodded, then slumped in his chair for the tiresome process of entering his notes into the computer. When he’d finished, he played with the notes, moving them around in blocks until he saw a sensible order. He thought about Fisk’s admission that cops may have been involved in Gentry’s death, then fashioned a lead to reflect that angle.

  As McCarthy immersed himself in the writing, Isabel Perez, a trim woman in her early thirties wearing a blue designer pantsuit, dodged through the desks toward LaFontaine, who had just finished ranking the cubbyholes around him for their protective qualities; he’d decided that if the Zombie ever snapped at the obituary desk, he’d belly-crawl behind the copying machine and put a metal trash can over his head.

  “Can you believe it?” Perez cried. She pointed to chief political reporter Kent Jackson’s story about Police Chief T. Lawrence Leslie being named Mayor Ricardo Portillo’s campaign manager. Her head whipped with each word. Her spiked bleached blond hair sliced the air like sword tips.

  “Everyone wins on some days, loses on others,” LaFontaine said. “Just ask McCarthy.”

  “You’re all heart, News,” McCarthy said, without looking up.

  Perez pouted. “I had a juicy little story about the fact that Tito Hernandez—the leader of that border rights organization?—thinks that Ricardo has sold out on immigrants in favor of big business.”

  “Didn’t see it,” News said. “Today’s paper?”

  “Tower spiked it,” Perez snapped. “Said Tito didn’t offer any evidence and he wasn’t going to publish an unsubstantiated attack.”

  That piqued LaFontaine’s interest. “Ed was probably just doing Ricardo a favor. They’re social buddies, you know.”

  “Don’t I ever,” Perez said. “Everything I write about the guy has to go through Ed’s Glasshole. Only stories like Jackson’s seem to get in the paper without a fight and I didn’t even get to write that.”

  News whispered so McCarthy wouldn’t hear, “I thought your Hispanic heritage would have made you the prime contender for the Leslie scoop, Ms. Peretzki.”

  “For Christ’s sake, News!” she hissed. “Somebody might hear.”

  Perez quickly looked at McCarthy and the Zombie to see if they’d noticed. McCarthy was engrossed at his terminal. The living dead reporter banged away at his keyboard, oblivious to the conversation and the wilting daffodil petals at his feet. Perez pouted again. It was unfair having someone as petty as LaFontaine knowing one of your
deep secrets.

  One night when Perez had too much white wine at an office party, LaFontaine, fluent in three of the four Romance languages, had spoken to her in Spanish. She had turned pale and excused herself.

  Which started News digging. It took a few months, but he determined Perez had about as much Latin blood as he did. Which was to say da nada. She was not remotely Hispanic, and he was probably the only one outside her immediate family who knew it.

  Shortly after the turn of the century a Hungarian stonemason named Igmar Peretzki got off the boat in New York. A hard-of-hearing immigration official took one look at the mason’s swarthy-complexion and wrote down the name Igmar Perez. The mistake would hamper the social and economic life of each subsequent generation of Peretzkis until Isabel. She learned well the lessons taught by unscrupulous reporters in the 1960s, who foresaw the coming backlash against the Euro males who’d long dominated the print and broadcast media through an old boys network that rarely hired women or minorities. Cunning careerists all, the Euro males had dyed their hair black. They Latinized their Anglo surnames. They rose quickly as newspapers and television news operations struggled to diversify their staffs in the wake of the Civil Rights movement.

  In the course of her career, Perez parlayed her surname into a steady stream of jobs and promotions. Several years back she became frightened that her inability to speak Spanish would catch up with her. She took a month off and traveled to Cuernavaca in a desperate bid to learn the language. She had a dyslexic tongue. After three weeks she gave up and decided the best way to avoid being caught was to become a political reporter.

  News had never told anyone of Perez’s East European lineage, but he’d let her know he knew, enjoying the way she squirmed at the threat of revelation. Perez, however, was nobody’s fool. She understood the commodity in which LaFontaine traded. She became one of his strongest intelligence moles, ferreting him out information on various happenings inside The Post with the fervor of a Mossad operative.