False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (4 page)

Few reporters who screwed up as spectacularly as he had found work on other papers. He was grateful to have something to ease his transition into he didn’t know what. He reviewed his notes on the Palmer case. He lit a Lucky looking at the empty page. He adjusted the ribbon, and picked dirt off the type. He studied the clips, and then he got up and fixed himself a sandwich.

Writing for the pulps didn’t feel right. He was a newspaper reporter, an important novelist about to be born. Anything else was just killing time. But the words wouldn’t come, and how could he kill the time without them? He opened a can of beer, and drank it at the typewriter. His mind remained blank. He tried to pretend that he was working on a long piece for the
Press,
nothing more ambitious. It didn’t help. He stopped thinking, and began to type.

The words poured out. He wrote without let-up, afraid of bottling them up inside. He brought his readers into Con
Palmer’s head, transported them to the death house, and left them there looking through the condemned man’s eyes. The difficulty was not in finding the words, but in restraining them—to keep from trying to make literature. He let the story tell itself in straightforward prose. All he had to do was to craft an ending, and get the manuscript on its way to New York.

He didn’t count the words. A good editor, any editor, would trim a few hundred, and he didn’t want to know exactly how many. Every cut was a nickel stolen from him. He corrected a few typos before slipping the manuscript into an envelope with a batch of clips to show that he hadn’t wandered far from the facts. He inked out
Atlantic City Press
from the envelope, wrote his return address, and sent it off.

He was elated as the story left his hands, at loose ends before he was home from the post office. He had nothing to do. Nothing but to get back to his novel while the terror of the empty page seized hold of him again.

Three weeks ago an armed man in battle fatigues had taken hostages in a Park Place restaurant. Jordan arrived on the heels of the police, crouching behind a cruiser as they tried to talk the man into surrendering. After an hour they stormed the restaurant and killed him. A waiter and a busboy, badly wounded, were rushed to a hospital. Jordan had called dictation with what he had, and hung around for more.

The 23-year-old hostess told him that she’d hidden in the kitchen. The gunman hadn’t noticed her, and she didn’t see him die. It wasn’t much of a story. She was a pretty girl, though. There was always room for a face like hers in the
Press
. Jordan had her in his viewfinder when a farm truck pulled up. The woman who rolled off the back in a wheelchair was the mother of the dead hostage-taker. Her son was not a soldier or disgruntled veteran, but a high school sophomore. He was somewhat slow—the woman touched a finger to her temple—and liked to
play cops and robbers. A detective came out of the restaurant with his guns, a Daisy air rifle and a cap pistol.

The hostess began to shake. Jordan took her to a tavern where she guzzled orange blossoms to no effect. At his apartment she smoked pot for the first time, and slept till noon wrapped in his shirt. Today it was his nerves that were shot. He had her phone number in his notepad, pretty sure he’d saved it. She was leaving for the restaurant when he caught her.

“Mollie, it’s Adam.”

“Do I know you?”

It was a question he often heard from women he brought back to his place.

“I meant to call sooner. But working on the paper, my life’s not my own.” He didn’t expect her to believe him, but intended to wear her down, his strategy for reluctant sources. “Things have been hectic. You saw my story on the execution?”

“Adam, did you say? I’m drawing a blank.”

“We sat at the bar after the shooting in your restaurant,” he said. “You couldn’t calm down.”

“I don’t drink,” she said.

“I wouldn’t call it drinking. We ended up here.”

“Wherever here is,” she said, “you’ve got the wrong Mollie.”

“That night I didn’t.”

“Now you do. Goodbye.”

She wanted contrition. No big deal. Sooner or later every girl had him saying he was sorry.

“Don’t hang up,” he said. “There’s a shirt in your closet with light blue pin-striping. The number from the Chinese laundry is D52.”

“Is this a mind-reading trick?” she said. “Do you also saw women in two?”

“It’s not magic,” he said. “You wore it home from my place.”

“It isn’t in my closet.”

“You didn’t throw it away? It’s a twenty-dollar shirt.”

“It went back to the laundry. It’s been waiting for you,” she said. “You took good care of me, Adam. But you also took advantage. And then I didn’t hear from you.”

“You don’t believe in second chances?” he said. “The judges I write about allow first-time offenders one mistake.”

“They don’t wake up in bed with them.”

She exhaled into the phone. Jordan wanted to believe it was a sigh of regret.

“You’re smart,” she said. “And sharp. Very, very cool. I’ve been dodging guys like you since high school. I’m not looking for someone I hear from after a month with an invitation to hop in the sack.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. It was hard to say he was sorry while he was being eaten alive.

There was nothing but to tell her he’d stop by her restaurant for the shirt. But not right away. After he had it where would he come up with an excuse to call again?

He blew dust off the shoebox where he kept his novel, and read the last chapter. The characters were strangers. He’d forgotten why he had them do the odd things they did. His notes on the plot made no sense. He couldn’t figure out what he’d had in mind, or how to get back on track. He opened a can of beer, and lit a cigarette. More terrifying than a blank page was having nothing to write.

He went to the corner for a
Press
. The man behind the counter was standing over him when he remembered to put a nickel on the counter. It was a peculiar feeling having to pay for a paper,
his
paper. He couldn’t say he liked it.

The paper looked the same. He’d considered himself the glue that held the
Press
together, and was disappointed in a way that it hadn’t fallen apart immediately without him. On the split page was a byline he didn’t recognize. R. Peter van Pelt was working the murder in Little Egg Harbor. Van Pelt favored the
inverted triangle style of newswriting taught in college—the most important facts at the top of the story followed by everything else in declining order of importance, and to hell with the human angle. Lieutenant Day was quoted as saying that his investigators were making progress. One thing van Pelt hadn’t learned in college was not to take the police at their word.

The victim remained nameless. Attempts to identify her through fingerprints and dental records had gone nowhere. A police artist’s sketch showed a woman of indeterminate age with a dirty face and stringy hair. She was sleepy-eyed, as if she’d been shaken awake and caught on paper before she could get herself together. There was little of the girl on the beach, of the prettiness remaining in death. Jordan blamed the police artist. Police artist struck him as an oxymoron. It was a funny notion that he could have built into a feature illustrated with a rogues gallery of unfortunates and wanted men. Too bad he hadn’t thought of it sooner. McAvoy would have squirmed at poking fun at the cops. Readers would have loved it.

The dead woman’s clothes, according to Lieutenant Day, were available in hundreds of modestly priced stores throughout the state. No description accompanied the story. Another thing they didn’t teach in journalism school was a reporter’s responsibility in keeping the police on their toes. Day was a cheapskate with the facts. Jordan would have reminded him that the
Press
had thousands of sharp-eyed readers, any one of whom might remember the clothing and the girl wearing it. He’d cultivated other sources in the state police and coroner’s office who loved to talk. His man at the morgue could be bribed for a look inside an evidence locker or refrigerator unit. Jordan figured that McAvoy was already eating his heart out over letting him go.

Dr. Melvin had ruled that the victim died of strangulation. Several articles of clothing had been “introduced” into her throat. Her undergarments were “disturbed” by her killer, and she had been “ravished.” Jordan would have used raped. McAvoy
preferred attacked, but would go with criminally assaulted. Jordan re-read the article to see what he’d missed. Trying to learn what had happened on the beach at Little Egg Harbor, he couldn’t get beyond van Pelt’s sorry treatment of the language.

There was boilerplate from the police asserting that they were working with the coroner’s office to have the victim identified. Vague mention of promising leads were a tip-off that the investigation was marking time. Jordan had been cultivating an assistant DA who would tell him what was really going on. What he’d do, he’d call him, and—What he would do was try to forget about the case. The murder wasn’t his. Nothing was.

From the day he’d gone to work on the
Press
, Jordan’s life had stopped being his own. He was a slave bringing home a decent salary, a night differential, and eight cents for every mile he used his car in pursuit of the news. He lived near the ocean, but didn’t have time for sailing, rarely went to the beach when he wasn’t called there for a look at a corpse. He showed up on the boardwalk to cover fires, and at nightclubs when he was assigned to provide free publicity. Atlantic City was a great place to visit. Unfortunately he was stuck here. It was one cliché he wouldn’t blame van Pelt for using.

He had all the time in the world now. But the beaches were cold, the ocean made him seasick. He didn’t fish. On his night-stand was a stack of books he’d been meaning to read, but writers who finished what they started gave him a sour feeling. Tuesday nights he liked to sit in a bar watching Milton Berle on the television. But it was too much time to kill by the hour.

He called the
Bulletin
. Flynn wasn’t expected till the end of the week. He drove to New York to catch Charles Mingus in the Village, and returned to Atlantic City after dawn. Two nights later he was back for Billie Holiday on Fifty-second Street, and to leave samples of his writing at the
Mirror
, the
Herald Tribune
, the
Telegram
, and the
Brooklyn Eagle
. Everyone had heard of the
Press
reporter who wore out a new Chevy in a year getting drunk every night on Third Avenue. Jordan put no faith in those stories. His Hudson—a better car—wasn’t going to last six months.

His name was mud at the big city newspapers where he wanted to work. He wouldn’t be caught dead in the backwaters that hadn’t been reached by word of his disgrace. He tried the
Bulletin
again. Flynn picked up, and said, “I was beginning to wonder if you were still alive.”

“Makes two of us,” Jordan said. “What did you think of my—of the death house piece?”

“You spoiled my readers,” Flynn said. “They expect everything flying out of my typewriter to be as good.”

Flynn wasn’t a professional Irishman. Jordan was put off by his easy flattery. “You heard—?”

“I just got back from three days in Punxsutawney. The whistle-pig died. They enticed a successor from his lair, and I was there for his investiture. In those precincts there’s not much to talk about other than the order of sciuridae. You were the second leading topic of conversation among visiting journalists.”

“Then you know why I’m calling.”

“You’re searching for a new place to collect a paycheck,” Flynn said, “and would be happier moving up rather than down.”

“Put in the word for me with your editors,” Jordan said. “Tell them the kind of reporter they’ll be getting.”

“They already know. I don’t have enough influence to change their mind.”

“Everyone who’s ever worked on a paper does what I did.”

“They don’t all get caught,” Flynn said. “I won’t step out on a limb for someone who’s going to saw it off under my feet.”

“I remember something different when you were asking me to cover for you in Trenton.”

“Haven’t you made empty promises to get a reluctant source to give you what you need?”

How did you answer without admitting the
Bulletin
would
be crazy to want you? “Rita Snyder can snap her fingers, and I’ll have a job just like that.”

“She isn’t a finger-snapper,” Flynn said.

“I’ll ask her.”

“She wants to forget you,” Flynn said. “It won’t do to remind her. Fisher showed up drunk. He stumbled around the stage, and called her a tub when we walked out on him. Rita blamed me. You more than me for getting us a ringside table.”

Jordan went to the beach, where he froze. He toured the boardwalk till he got blisters. He hung around bars when Milton Berle wasn’t on the TV. He put down his novel, and worked on a short story that he threw away. He wrote two others as bad as the first. He learned that he didn’t have a suicidal bone in his body.

The New York papers turned him down. He tried the
Post
and the
News
, and stayed in the city to hear Miles Davis at a joint off Sheridan Square. His mailbox was stuffed when he came home. A letter from Turner Men’s Group stood out from the bills and the junk.

The way his luck was running, it had to be a rejection. But the manuscript came back with a rejection, didn’t it? He dropped the envelope twice before he got it open, and a check for two-hundred, eighty-four dollars and sixty cents sailed to the floor.

Jordan kissed it. He wanted to show it to his friends, to frame it, but most of all to spend it. Until he lived off his earnings he wasn’t ready to call himself a writer.

He phoned Pelfrey at
Real Detective
, who said, “Congratulations, welcome to the staff.”

“When are you going with my story? I’ll need to pick up a dozen copies.”

“I’ll put you down for two dozen,” Pelfrey said. “It’s how we maintain circulation, selling magazines to new writers. We’ve got you scheduled for March
Sensational Detective
, one of our best-selling titles.”