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  “I know, Isabel!” LaFontaine said. “Why don’t you complain to Arlene Troy about the leak.”

  “News, you’re merciless!” she bitched.

  “A great reporter has no friends,” he drawled.

  Arlene Troy, a lesbian, was Mayor Portillo’s press secretary and personal liaison with the gay community. In the last year and a half, Perez’s spectacular career trajectory had stalled at the level of backup to chief political reporter Kent Jackson. Perez had dropped hints lately that she was a lesbian, a bisexual at the very least. The strange logic being that if she and others in the business had gotten this far on bogus Hispanic names, she’d go them one better; she’d paint herself in sapphic mystery. In a business so fixated with making the world juste, what could be more politically correct than a Latina lesbian political reporter? Perez figured it was only a matter of time before she supplanted Jackson as top political dog. Or maybe more.

  This LaFontaine knew. Yet even he, a man who reveled in chronicling the lengths reporters will go to in the name of personal glory, had been unable to contain himself when he first heard the rumor of Perez kicking the closet door open.

  “I’m sorry,” he’d gagged. “If Isabel’s a dyke, I read Playboy for the pictures!”

  Perez didn’t speak to News for a week after that comment, which had seeped through the newspaper and over her reputation like spilled ink.

  News could see that she was at least as angry now. He was in for another week of cold silence from one of his best gossip sources. Better cool the sarcasm.

  The elevator opened. A stooped older man with thick black hair, black sideburns, black eyeglasses, black leather pants, black silk shirt, and black cowboy boots stepped out. The man clutched a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee. LaFontaine plucked a dollar from his pocket before Perez could storm away.

  “This symbol of our first president says Roy Orbison will mess his desk with yonder cup of Java within four minutes of reaching his place of toil,” he said.

  Perez stopped short. She couldn’t resist the daily spilt-coffee pool. Ralph Baker, otherwise known as “Roy Orbison,” shuffled into the newsroom. Perez noted the quiver in his gait and gave value to his hand tremors. She handed News a dollar.

  “Three minutes, tops,” she said. “I don’t think Roy even put up a fight. He was absolutely pinned by the time Ted Koppel shook his wig on ‘Nightline.’ ”

  “Tut, tut, dear Isabel,” LaFontaine said. “You underestimate the range of someone who might sing ‘Pretty Woman’ in three octaves. I say that marvelous iron gut fought the vodka to a draw. Four minutes thirty seconds.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Anybody else?” LaFontaine cried, waving the two dollars in the air. “Zombie?”

  The Zombie’s callused fingers beat out a wicked rhythm on his keyboard, but his eyes didn’t glow hotter in response.

  “Out for today as well as every other I see,” LaFontaine said. “Abby, how about it? A bet on Mr. Orbison?”

  Abby Blitzer, a petite woman with stringy red hair and beautiful green eyes, glanced up from her desk where she’d been rifling through The Beacon. She glanced at Baker. “Ralph couldn’t even hold a guitar still. I give him two minutes thirty, tops. Put me and Croon down for that.”

  Though she had only been on The Post’s staff a year, Abby Blitzer had already forged a reputation as one of the city’s best street reporters. And it was well-known that before coming to The Post she’d dried out at the Betty Ford Clinic. If anyone could handicap a journalist as far gone as Ralph Baker, it was Abby Blitzer.

  “Okay, Abby, here’s my buck,” said Augustus Croon, a muscular photographer perched on the corner of Blitzer’s desk. “We see splashes of Chock Full O’ Nuts two and a half minutes after Roy reaches his desk.”

  Blitzer patted his leg appreciatively. “Thank you for your support, Croon.”

  “Anything for you, Abby,” he said. He grinned bashfully and fiddled with the cameras that hung around his neck.

  “Don’t moon, Croon,” Blitzer said. “It’s unbecoming.”

  “Just sort of happens,” Croon protested. “You being so cute and all.”

  Blitzer’s face hardened. “No mooning.”

  Croon took the deep, concentrating breath he’d been taught in Navy SEAL School, but tended to forget in her presence. He let it out slow, forcing the energy into his small intestines. “The moon has set. I promise!”

  LaFontaine’s lip curled in contempt. “If Croon’s hetero longing has ebbed, I think we have bets to close. Velvet voice approaches.”

  The leather-clad wonder clutching the hot coffee had now made his way to the far window. He stared across at The Beacon newsroom. He raised his middle finger.

  “The daily bird has been given,” LaFontaine said. “Fifteen seconds to close bets.”

  Kent Jackson, the lead political reporter, rushed to LaFontaine, his red power tie streaming over one shoulder. He held out a dollar. “One minute thirty.”

  “Wouldn’t be a real game of chance without you, Kent,” said LaFontaine, who still found it amazing that a born-again reporter loved to gamble. News held up an imaginary gavel: “Going once, going twice …”

  “Two minutes forty-five,” McCarthy said. He had just finished the first draft of his story. “Not a second more.”

  “Now we’ve got a contest!” LaFontaine crowed.

  Baker stumbled to his desk. He nodded to them, then shakily set the coffee down.

  News whispered: “Time.” It was 2:07:30 P.M.

  “Anything breaking?” the old reporter asked.

  LaFontaine replied, “The city knows better than to let anything happen until you get here for the late shift, especially with … uh … how long until you retire?”

  “Three weeks, two days, eight hours, ten minutes …” Baker tugged a gold pocket watch from his black leather vest. “Fourteen seconds.”

  “Accuracy, that’s the ticket,” News said.

  With unsteady hands Baker drew a ballpoint pen from his top drawer and placed it on the desk. He unfolded The Beacon, spread it out before him, and perused page A-l. With a tremor about 4.5 on the Richter scale, he reached for his coffee. He brought it in a shake and a tremble to his lips. He seared his tongue, almost dropping the cup. Gasps from every quarter. Twenty-seven seconds: a potential world record for the Daily Roy Orbison!

  But the old reporter summoned control from deep in his core and managed to set the cup down without mishap. The reporters heaved a sigh of relief.

  Ralph Baker was once a shooting star in local journalism, a holy terror of a reporter whose scoops were legendary. He’d begun his career with the now-defunct Chronicle, where he’d jousted with Mafia lawyers and covered the same corruption scandals in Mayor Jennings’s administration that had won Connor Lawlor the Pulitzer. Later he did a stint in Saigon. When The Chronicle died, The Post hired him to cover Sacramento.

  But that was long ago. These days, after nearly four decades on deadline, Baker’s muscles constantly twitched, not with anticipation but with weariness. He was a rewrite man now, an anachronism in daily newspapers. Street reporters used to call in notes to rewriters who produced the tight, punchy copy. Advances in technology all but doomed the position at modern newspapers. But Baker was too burned out to be good for anything else and the denizens of Lobotomy Lane couldn’t bring themselves to fire him. Baker was a contemporary of Ed Tower and Connor Lawlor. He was the ghost of old news.

  So he worked the rewrite shift, 2:00 to 10:00 P.M. Most days he sat quietly at his desk, suffering from hangover, drinking coffee, reading newspapers, and waiting for that rare moment when copy had to be written fast and tight on deadline.

  No one could explain the outfit. He began sporting the rock star look shortly after moving to rewrite five years ago. One day he abandoned his brown polyester trousers in favor of black leather pants. The next day he added the black silk shirt. The day after that the hand-stitched cowboy boots. He grew his hair out. He had his bangs
cut straight, an inch above his eyebrows. Then he died his gray hair lacquer black and changed his glasses from tortoise-shell to thick inky polymer. LaFontaine had christened him “Roy Orbison” for he was “only the lonely.” The name stuck.

  Forty-five seconds into the contest, more than one reporter in the betting pool shivered. They worried that unless they let their eyes glaze over and became editors soon, or decided the truth was for sale and became public relations flacks, they might wake up one day thinking it was a swell idea to come to work clad as Michael Jackson or Minnie Pearl or Judy Garland, or, in LaFontaine’s case, Norma Jean.

  Fifty-six seconds. Augustus Croon warded off thoughts of dressing as Jethro Bodine in the old “Beverly Hillbilly” reruns by talking to Blitzer. “Hoping for tragedy, Abby?”

  Blitzer’s face took on the sort of dreamy expression she used to reserve for Jack Daniel’s straight up. “Don’t we always, Croon? It’s been so long since we really had something meaty to report on.”

  “There was that pileup on the interstate last week,” Croon offered.

  “Boo-hoo journalism,” Blitzer sniffed. “Over before we got there. Talk to the relatives, get the crying moms and dads. But nothing on the scene, you know?”

  “Maybe today,” Croon said. “Tragedy can come at any hour.”

  Blitzer got dewy-eyed. “That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?”

  Baker turned the page of his newspaper. He reached for his coffee.

  “Dear Abby, Abby,” Croon whispered.

  “Ahh, sonofabitch!” Blitzer said. Dear Abby always upset Baker.

  The leather-clad reporter read the disturbing marital travails of a housewife from Omaha. The other reporters tensed. Kent Jackson played with his cuff link and smiled; a minute thirty and the coffee was as good as spilled.

  A miracle! A sip and no stain.

  “I couldn’t win a bet laid down by Moses these days,” Jackson said, disgusted. He whirled in his tracks and raced off toward the sports section to lay down ten dollars on this afternoon’s Dodgers’ game.

  One minute forty-five. Two minutes. Two minutes fifteen seconds.

  “Damn it, Abby, we’re going to lose,” Croon groaned.

  Baker turned the page to Ann Landers.

  “I’m feeling good, real good,” Perez said.

  “He’s mine,” News proclaimed, knowing Ann Landers’s predilection to stagger her letters so the most pathetic came later in the column.

  But Ann Landers broke habit. Her first letter concerned a sixteen-year-old whose mother had committed suicide in front of her. The poor girl’s plight—bed-wetting, drugs, and poor school performance—triggered a snuffle. That irritated Baker’s cigarette-and vodka-charred throat, which set off the coughing jag. He hacked. He chortled. His eyes bulged. At two minutes twenty-nine seconds he reached for the coffee cup.

  “Sonofa, sonofa, sonofa,” Blitzer sighed.

  “Life is fundamentally unfair to minorities,” Perez fretted.

  “One can only pray for divine intervention,” LaFontaine said. “Ghost of Buddy Holly help us now.”

  Baker choked on the liquid. He made a nasty gurgling noise, then spewed a mouthful out onto the desk. He pitched forward, upsetting the cup. Hot coffee splashed on his hand, spurring a three-octave bellow that would have done his namesake proud. Chock Full O’ Nuts ran like the Big Muddy across his desk. For a moment McCarthy stopped feeling sorry for himself. He’d won the Daily Roy Orbison.

  After Baker had mopped his desk and gone in search of a dry copy of Ann Landers, LaFontaine handed over the cash from the pool. “Your analytical skills never cease to amaze me, Gid.”

  Blitzer nodded. “A gift.”

  A woman dressed in a red, embroidered Guatemalan smock, standing on the other side of the room, said, “I think it’s obscene you bet on that poor man’s tremors every day. Behind that black leather hide is an inner child suffering.”

  “Give me a break, Oracle,” Blitzer said, not bothering to look in Margaret Savage’s direction. “Anything behind the leather is the bastard of Stolychnaya.”

  “And your language! Don’t you know how demeaning the term bastard is to children out of wedlock?”

  “Why don’t you go look at newsprint rolls in the printing plant and weep for the Ponderosa pine,” Perez said.

  When the rest of the reporters started laughing, Savage trained as much hate at them as her Zen-trained mind would allow. Fifteen months ago, Savage had never worked for a newspaper. Now she was The Post’s city columnist and favorite friend to Bobbie Anne Pace, the Assistant Managing Editor for News and Information. Bobbie Anne Pace oversaw the city desk. Bobbie Anne Pace, as much as anyone on Lobotomy Lane, ruled the destiny of every reporter in the room.

  Savage said, “It’s Neanderthals like you that are the problem with the media. Mark my words: Ralph Baker will surprise us all someday.”

  They all laughed again. Like most daily journalists, their vision of what could be was consistently clouded by what was. That is to say, they wore conventional wisdom like smoked welding goggles. The party line held that Baker was gone, maybe not a walking dead like the Zombie, but certainly a word musician whose internal Fender Telecaster had lost more than a few strings. Savage sneered at them all and left.

  LaFontaine watched to see which Glasshole she’d head for. Perez wondered whether Birkenstocks and peasant dresses might help her dethrone Kent Jackson. Abby and Croon chatted idly about the news value of a tragedy involving a deer hunter and a vegetarian.

  McCarthy tucked the Roy Orbison winnings in his pocket, filed his story, then grabbed his briefcase. “Got to go,” he said. “I’ve got a long night ahead of me.”

  The reporters displayed expressions of pity as he departed. Inside they all thought: Better McCarthy than me.

  Doing The Neil and Bobbie …

  EVERY DAY AT 11:30 A.M. all editors up to the level of assistant managing editor gathered for the first of four news meetings that set The Post’s hierarchy of story play. The conference room was a cramped affair with a fourteen-foot rectangular table and twelve blue overstuffed chairs. Sections of today’s editions were thumbtacked to the walls. The disparity between The Beacon’s shouting headline on A-l about the hooker found dead and McCarthy’s lame story on B-l was palpable and depressing. But ten minutes into the meeting, style, not substance, dominated the discussion.

  Stanley Geld grabbed the gold stud in his left ear, twisted it, and groaned, “It’s fashion, Bobbie Anne, and unless there’s a murdered designer to give the stories intrigue or the stories substantiate the presence of carcinogenic dyes in the fall cardigan line, it’s not hard news, it’s puff.”

  Bobbie Anne Pace, a borderline anorexic woman in her early forties, khaki-clad and imperious of attitude, replied: “I spent a decade writing that puff as you call it. And I’m here to tell you, you’re behind the times, Stanley. There’s as much value in putting fashion trends on the front page as the latest crime spree. Where would culture be without Ralph Lauren? Tell me that!”

  From the exact opposite end of the table came a reluctant if extremely sexy voice: “Bobbie’s right. Our most recent market surveys among women twenty to fifty-five indicate fashion coverage is an important consideration in buying a daily newspaper.”

  The entire pod of Stepford Editors turned as one to Neil Harpster, The Post’s sweet-eyed wunderkind, the Assistant Managing Editor for Form and Content. They hated him for what they loved about him: smart, thirty-nine, ridiculously handsome, married to a wealthy heiress. The fates were behind him. He could hold their careers in his hands. He could become editor-in-chief!

  Harpster detested himself for taking Pace’s side. She was his biggest rival for the next rung up the ladder. Still, there was no disputing the statistics. He reached to adjust his tie, in the process causing an almost-imperceptible snap in his heavily starched shirt. He paused to let the effect linger, then declared: “The numbers are clear then: Ralph Lauren has strong readership.”


  “See, Stanley!” Pace said, turning triumphantly to the city editor.

  Geld shivered. Was he going into shock? Technically Pace and Harpster held positions of equal influence over Geld’s operation. But here at the morning news meeting they constantly vied for position. Today’s display of solidarity was unprecedented.

  Geld glanced across the table at Claudette X, his executive assistant city editor, and twisted his lips to one side as if he were tasting something unappealing. Claudette X knew what he was doing and did her utmost to keep from laughing. In private, Geld called this meeting the “Daily Blow Job”; for every morning he came to the conference room to “Do the Neil and Bobbie.”

  Until quite recently Geld had been a rock-solid editorial force in The Post newsroom. Determined, crafty, and experienced, he was the paper’s field commander. For years he’d run the hard news operation with a steady and, at times, aggressive hand. More importantly, he hadn’t made any major mistakes during his tenure and seemed a likely bet for future promotion to assistant managing editor, a position he’d long coveted.

  All that had changed after Pace dashed through a series of career coups d’état that culminated in her seizing the Glasshole of Geld’s dreams.

  Pace stole Geld’s future by playing high priest to a temple built by Margaret Savage. Indeed, until Pace’s chance encounter with Savage, no journalism career had a flatter trajectory. For more than a decade Pace toiled in obscurity as the fashion editor of The Post, a newspaper that gave little more than agate type for stories about clothes.

  Then one day, dressed as usual in basic black silk, she had decided to cover a “Fight The Fur” fashion show being jointly sponsored by the Sierra Club and an offshoot group called Advocates of Pelt-Bearing Mammals.

  Savage, then director of a committed public relations organization, handled spin control for the event. She wore blue shorts and a white cotton T-shirt that simultaneously managed to protest the destruction of the rain forest, the loss of spotted owl habitat in Oregon, as well as the heresy of mountain lion hunting in California. An epiphany! Pace had never before considered fashion as a political statement. Savage, in contrast, considered every word, thought, action, desire, and object, animate or inanimate, a political statement. They became instant allies.