My hand shook slightly. I emptied out the rest of the water and dumped the cup in the trash. “The universe works in magical ways.”
“So do crazed senior citizens with a penchant for swinging baseball bats at random low levels.”
“Yes.” I started walking over to my desk, wishing Mr. Salvo would just drop it already, when I stopped.
Something was off.
“Well, at least your mind’s on Stiletto and off this Shatsky thing. Man, Notch is driving me up the wall. He is so obsessed with making sure our stories don’t imply Shatsky was murdered. Like I told him, if the police come out and say it’s a murder, fine. Otherwise, we’re just printing what we know. Woman dies in a salon. Period.”
“Mr. Salvo, why is Alison Roach sitting at my desk?”
Alison’s black jacket, the one she’d worn yesterday, was hanging over the back of my chair. Gone was my photo of Jane, the tiny pink-framed mirror I pasted to the side of the computer so I could check my lip gloss 24/7, and the two bottles of nail polish I kept ready to repair keyboard-induced tip damage.
And where was my beautician’s license and vase with the pink plastic flower?
I felt a pang of anxiety. Alison could not take over my desk. I LOVED my desk. I loved it partly because it was next to Lawless, the beat-cop reporter, not that I loved Lawless or anything. What I loved was his police scanner, which emitted a regular chatter among dispatchers, cops, firemen and emergency-service types. Every once in a while, the chatter would break and something big would erupt: a fire, a fatal car accident, a shooting. Then the thrills would begin.
“Is Alison taking over my desk?”
Mr. Salvo shuffled the papers on his clipboard, a sure sign of a guilty conscience. “Uh, Notch decided to move her next to Lawless for, you know, training.”
“Training for what? Police reporter? Because that’s supposed to be my next job, cops or courts, and so far I haven’t gotten farther than Mahoken.”
Mr. Salvo didn’t say anything until he uttered some diplomatic nonsense about every rookie reporter needing to learn how to cover a fire, blah, blah, blah.
“And where am I to sit?”
He pointed to lifestyle, where a computer in the smallest cubicle sat untouched, waiting for my fingers. Maybe someone was being a smart-ass, placing me in Flossie Foreman’s department after Genevieve’s thuggery. Or maybe Mr. Notch was sending me a message that I was on my way out. For if I wasn’t mistaken, that cubicle belonged to Marty Finkleman, our eighty-year-old obits writer, who worked part-time nights.
“I’m sharing a desk with Marty?”
“Only for a while, until Alison gets her sea legs. So Stiletto came by this morning looking for some clips,” he said, trying to distract my attention away from the usurpation of MY DESK! “Too bad you weren’t here.”
For once—and only once—I cared about something more than Stiletto. I cared about my desk, the symbol of all that I had sacrificed and worked to achieve. Marty Finkleman’s corner cubicle was the lowest of the low. It was the dunces’ corner and I was the dunce.
Well, I thought, pushing back my white sleeves, I’d been at the bottom before and had crawled my way up. Notch was sadly mistaken if he thought this public demotion would make me toe the line, that I would humbly do as he ordered until he begrudgingly accepted me back into his good graces.
Now I was determined, more determined than before, to investigate Debbie’s murder and write it up into a blockbuster page-one thriller. I would show him and the lackadaisical Lehigh PD that they’d been wrong about Sandy or wrong about Debbie’s death being an accident.
And I didn’t care if by that time Notch had relegated me to the basement.
Chapter Eighteen
I
waited until Doris the librarian left work exactly at five oh one to slip out of my dunce’s corner and run down the hall to the morgue.
Doris was a dour woman, as yellow as the rubbery mucilage she used to paste her yellowing newspaper clips to yellow paper for preservation. She excelled in Schadenfreude, the exquisite Pennsylvania art of relishing the misfortune of others. Therefore, I could not dig through clips of Ern Bender and Debbie Shatsky under Doris’s vulturelike gaze without fully expecting her to run straight to Notch to tattle.
While other newspapers had upgraded to computerized archiving more than a decade ago, the morgue of the
News-Times
was stuck in the Dark Ages thanks to Doris. I wasn’t exactly clear on why they couldn’t modernize and lay her off as they had the old guys in the newsprint hats who used to run hot type upstairs. Lorena told me once that Doris had naughty photos of Notch she’d whip out as blackmail whenever he broached the possibility of going completely online.
All I knew was that if I were lucky enough to have naughty photos of Notch, I’d a) induce blindness in myself so I wouldn’t have to look at them and b) sure as hell use them to do more than keep my job as a lonely librarian in the windowless morgue.
As I had feared, the
Bender, Ern
file was gone. Possibly it had never existed. Doris maintained an arcane filing system, another key to her survival. It always bothered me that she filed animal abuse cases under “Pets,” for example. Or that rape cases were under “Sex.” I had to put my head into Doris’s head for a second before I was rewarded with one clip in “Pharmacies”—a major fire at Save-T Drugs.
I vaguely remembered the blaze, which had taken out the back half of Save-T Drugs about seven years ago. Ern was quoted in the article as being an assistant pharmacist, which meant the fire occurred before he was busted for selling laced Cokes.
According to the article, the fire was of a “suspicious origin” and was located in the pharmacy section of the drugstore. Ern mused to the reporter that perhaps it was faulty electrical wiring, that he’d been hearing mice late at night chewing on the wires.
Mice? Good one, Ern.
“Meth fire.”
Lawless was reading over my shoulder. I should have recognized the reek of chocolate and peanut butter. Lately he’d fallen off the candy wagon and had sacrificed his soul to the god of vending machines, provider of Holy Twix. His relaxed-fit Dockers were no longer relaxed; they were downright uptight.
“It came out at his trial that Bender was cooking up methamphetamines in the back room and stealing Sudafed from Save-T to do it.” He finished the last of his Reese’s. “Some kindly neighborhood druggist, say?”
I quickly slipped the article back into the file. How could I have been so stupid as to just stand here reading this? Now Lawless would surely rat me out to Notch.
“It’s the twentieth anniversary of the big Mahoken town hall fire,” I lied with false innocence, shoving the file back into the cabinet. “Happened to come across this.”
“You were looking for a clip on the Mahoken town hall fire in the pharmacy file?” Lawless grinned. “Come off it, Yablonsky. You and I both know what you were up to. You were digging up background on Ern Bender.”
“Never!”
“You could get axed immediately for that. Notch sent out a memo that we weren’t to discuss anything Shatsky with you and that included her ex-husband.”
I tensed, waiting for Lawless to pick up the phone and interrupt Notch’s nightly edit meeting with the glorious revelation that he’d found me snooping. Notch would love nothing more than to fire me in front of all the editors as proof of how willing he was to exert his power. He would have done really, really well in the Crusades.
But Lawless didn’t pick up the phone. Nor did he lecture or warn me. He said, “I followed you back here so we could talk. Dix Notch is out of control and we have to stop him.”
This made me shut the file drawer much louder than I intended. “What?”
“I know, I know,” he said, hitching up his trousers legs and perching at the edge of Doris’s desk. “You and I aren’t famous for getting along. But in these circumstances I think it’s best that we join forces.”
“Okay.” I pulled out Doris’s fancy ergonomic backward chair. “Keep talking.”
“He’s psycho about this stupid Shatsky case, which seems like a routine accidental poisoning if you ask me. I mean, the woman had an allergy to latex and died. So what? Lots of people have allergies and die. To bees, to penicillin, some to peanuts. Though, if you ask me, I think that one’s way overblown.”
I swallowed. Where was Lawless going with this?
“I don’t have a conflict of interest—unlike you—and I’m the cop reporter. I’m supposed to be writing this, right? It’s my fucking job.”
“Right.” Though Lawless would do one heck of a lazy job.
“I mean this is standard stuff. But not to Notch. Jesus H. You’d think this stupid fatal allergy involved the White House the way he’s all over it. He wants total control. Won’t let me make one phone call.”
“Not one phone call?”
“Can’t even discuss it with my standard sources. Threatened to fire me if I did, too.”
I leaned back in Doris’s goofy ergonomic chair and nearly fell over. Lawless actually saved me by reaching over and catching the back. “This fucking chair cost two grand, you know,” he said. “I don’t know what Doris has got over Notch but she uses it to acquire some pretty useless shit.”
Lawless liked to swear. He was a swearing virtuoso.
I steadied Doris’s chair and said, “So who’s covering the Shatsky homicide if you’re not?” Like I didn’t already know the answer.
“That pipsqueak rookie Alison Roach.” Lawless snarled. “Notch is calling her into his office every ten minutes and she’s reporting on this exactly the way he wants. I swear, she must be giving him hummers because he can’t leave her alone.”
“Full Sweeneys,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Full Sweeneys. That’s our term for hummers.”
“What’s a partial Sweeney?”
“A very bad Saturday night.”
Lawless scratched his ear. “Whatever. The point is that while I’m not one to run with conspiracies, I’m beginning to think with the way he’s controlling this story, Notch has something to hide. Now I’m questioning whether this wasn’t a freak latex poisoning death, but maybe more. Maybe”—Lawless coughed as though he were choking on his own words—“maybe you’re, um, right.”
This time I held on to Doris’s desk so I didn’t tip backward. “Can I have that in writing?”
“Don’t be smug. Listen, if you tell me what you’ve found out, I might be able to put it together with what I know and we can compare notes to determine if Notch has some connection to this murder.”
I couldn’t see how. Besides, I didn’t trust Lawless. He could be spying on me for Notch, though what Lawless said about Notch and Alison Roach was true. It did raise the possibility that Notch was snuffing a story for his own purposes. Notch had a lot of close ties into Lehigh’s business community. He did not operate independently, as newspaper editors should. He was more concerned with greasing his own wheels than the wheels of justice.
Then again, this was coming from
Lawless
.
“I can see you’re not sure about my proposal. Fine. I understand. You think I might be a mole for Notch. So, to show I’m on the up and up, I’ll share some juice a cop told me this afternoon.” Lawless walked over to the library door and shut it. “Ern Bender came to the police station last night looking for protection. Said his life was in danger and he couldn’t protect himself because, as a felon, he’s not allowed to have a gun.”
Lawless scrutinized my reaction carefully. I still wasn’t sure if he was on the take, so I tried to keep my expression neutral, even though this validated my hunch that the Christmas tree lot hadn’t been shot up by the violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby. It was good to know Bender was alive and not killed by the .22 caliber one-shot that had killed the blue spruce.
“Here’s something else. I got a call this morning from a guy I’ve written about for five years. Louie Murray, aka Louis Moran aka Lucky Louie aka Lola Lou. That was during his drag years.”
“Sounds like a busy man. Except for his drag years.”
“That’s Louie all right. Busy. Used to run a craps game in Freemansburg. Been in and out of jail a dozen times. Anyway, he read Roach’s story this morning about Shatsky being a successful travel agent and all, how she was a fifth-degree queen of the muckety-muck for the Order of the Eastern Star and such. Fucking church lady. Seems he had quite a problem with that.”
Something in Lawless’s statement hit a nerve, triggered a memory I couldn’t quite place in context. I hate when that happens. It’s like forgetting what you want to say. I just knew this was what my senior years were going to be like if I didn’t start eating gingko by the bucket.
“Are you listening to me?”
“I’m listening,” I said, still trying to remember.
“Louie claims Shatsky hired him last year, during one of his brief vacations from the clink, to work on one of her Love Boat cruises off Atlantic City. Wasn’t interested in him serving drinks or swabbing the deck. Louie claims she wanted him to put his con artist skills to good use posing as a rising Lehigh steel exec looking for the perfect wife. Louie said he got laid on that cruise more times than he could count and still Debbie paid him big bucks for his services.”
That was it! The night before in the women’s room, either Tess or the brunette had mentioned the “lust boat” cruises being filled with ex-cons. But why would Debbie use ex-cons to pose as loopers? Why didn’t she use the real thing?
Loopers were men, always men, who ground out successive six-month stints at the steel plants in Baltimore, Williamsport, Johnstown, Lebanon, Pottstown and, if they were fortunate, San Francisco, before being deemed worthy of vice president status. They were the industrial equivalent of circuit riders, lonely and often single, looking for women willing to pull up roots twice a year and move on. Either that or settle for a one-night stand.
For many in Lehigh’s working-class community, marrying a looper meant a step up the economic ladder, a financially secure lifestyle. A looper who survived the circuit was assured a six-figure salary, a nice house in a good neighborhood, an automatic membership to the country club and the permanent title of vice president.