Authors: Katia Lief
“I had to go all the way up with this one. Overly –” he was our publisher “– almost wouldn’t do it without more confirmable sources. But the photos swayed him; you can’t argue with an image. We don’t like to make mistakes but worst-case scenario we print a correction later in the week and drop the story.”
“Drop the story?” I regretted the question as soon as the words escaped me.
Elliot froze in the middle of sliding an arm into his jacket. “Yes, if necessary.”
“Thanks, boss,” Courtney said. “But I don’t think we’ll need a correction.”
“I really hope we don’t. Make any progress on the land purchase? Documents: who sold it, who bought it, how much, when?”
“Working on it,” I said. “There’s no confusion about who the buyer was, but so far there have been some contradictions about the seller.”
Elliot nodded. “Contact your source.”
I had been trying to avoid that so as not to unnecessarily expose Abe Starkman but Elliot was right – at this point I had no choice. If there had been a back-room negotiation resulting in the land deal, somewhere there was a trail of paperwork or money or something. My guess was that the real agreement that finally enticed Tony T to sell his lots was hidden behind dummy paperwork, since the lots were parts of a larger parcel of land and would have to be accounted for by many people over many years. I would call Abe and ask for help.
“OK,” I said.
“Good. I’ll see you two tomorrow.” Elliot picked up his briefcase and walked around his desk to his office door. Courtney caught him with a question on his way out:
“What page?”
“Eight. Buried, like your bones. ’Night.” And he was gone.
The day had passed in a flurry of putting our story to bed – though it felt like more of a start than an ending. Courtney and I both expected the story to grow after tomorrow and we were excited about delving deeper into it. We were aware that, if we were allowed to, it would mean peeling back one layer at a time, presenting elements as they were revealed to us, as opposed to pointing a finger at the government and crying, “Corruption!” You never
did
that because you’d only look crazy and what if you were wrong? We couldn’t afford to be wrong. Which was why I had to call Abe Starkman; if he was as concerned as he’d said – and I believed he was – then he would be motivated to substantiate his claim about the developer buying land from the mob in a deal with the city for leniency. That, officially, would be the most explosive element of the story and we had to substantiate it before even an insinuation could go to print.
I left Abe a message on his voicemail, saying very little in case anyone else listened to his messages, using just my first name and asking for a call back on my cell phone. Then I went home.
I was too tired to cook so Nat and I shared a pizza and salad. He had finished his homework before dinner and to persuade me to let him watch some TV before bed, breaking a long-standing no-TV-on-school-nights rule, he did the dishes. I wasn’t too hard to break down. We got into our pajamas, sat together on the living room couch and watched a random assortment of television that led us through a maze of laughter, disgust and boredom. At ten o’clock we said goodnight to the tube and each other. I kissed him on the cheek at the threshold of his room and reminded him to pack a bag for his sleepover at Henry’s tomorrow night. They were going straight home to Henry’s after school and in the evening The
Dad
, as Nat called him, planned to take the boys to Yankees stadium. Nat had been looking forward to this for two weeks and it was why I had felt free to plan a meeting with Rich, who had custody of his five-year-old daughter on alternate weekends, this not being one of them. Such easily won freedom rarely occurred in my schedule and it had seemed a shame to waste it.
Before turning off the lights I sprawled on my bed beneath my laptop and checked in with Sara. She had already gone to bed so there would be no IMing but she had left me a goodnight email, which concluded:
“Stopped at Copy Cats this afternoon. Said Joe was born and bred on the island and they’d known him more or less his whole life. Said he was a hard worker. Said he worked there for two years. Said he didn’t seem to have any friends. Said he tried to date their teenage daughter but they put an end to that and Joe backed off. No problem after that. Lived with his mother who sometimes brought him lunch. Said she was a ‘strange cookie’ and seemed lonely. Oh, but listen to this: Joe left a box of personal stuff behind and when they heard about you working with him in NYC they asked me to pass it along so I’ve got it in my car! Haven’t had a chance to open it yet. Will keep you posted if anything juicy. Body parts etc. ”
Joe. I didn’t want to even think about him; if I did I wouldn’t sleep and I wanted to be rested because
tomorrow
was a somewhat big day. The story would appear in the paper and there was always some backlash after anything remotely controversial came out – there would be emails and phone calls to field. Hopefully I would be able to make my regular Friday lunch with my mother. That I had visited her on Wednesday wouldn’t alter her expectation of seeing me for lunch on Friday; she herself might forget but it was on her calendar and the attendants would remind her. Once, she waited for me all day in the common room when I had told her – but not written down – that I would stop by after work in the evening. So there was the article, there was lunch with my mother and at night there was my meeting … my
date
with Rich. And Abe Starkman still hadn’t returned my call, which worried me. I took a sleeping pill, just to be sure I’d get some rest despite my churning mind, and the next thing I knew it was morning.
The
Times
hit the streets at about 6 a.m., earlier in some places. I didn’t see it until nine, when I reached the office. By that time the story had gained some traction and my email inbox was brimming, more so than I’d expected. Elliot had forwarded some from home where he often began his workday before dawn.
The Buildings Department, the developer and the
contractor
who had done the demolition on the Pacific Street lots denied knowing anything about the bones. The developer’s spokeswoman also wrote in to say that Livingston & Sons would never have knowingly approved the use of any contractor she referred to as an “uncertified service provider”, alluding to the bones’ transit from Pacific Street to Pearson. So the players were nervous. Elliot was excited by the response and told us via an early morning email that we should “go with it”. The emails themselves, and whatever else we came up with throughout the day, would be fodder for a follow-up piece.
Courtney came in shortly after I did, having been out on an early interview for a different story she was working on, and I told her to read her emails while I continued going through my own list of new mail. A list that would be longer than Courtney’s, I discovered, as I had received some very special emails all my own.
From Joe.
I had taken the absence of a bagel on my desk the last two mornings to signify that he was backing off. I had really thought he’d be ashamed of himself for having followed me uptown on Wednesday. Instead, he had sent me … I counted … twenty-three emails. All kinds. Offering me no fewer than eight more writing samples. Giving me his new address in Red
Hook
and inviting me and Nat to dinner at 6 p.m. next Saturday night. Supplying me with links to blogs I really had to check out. Chastising me for ignoring him like he was “just some guy from the mailroom”. There were three identical emails with the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice”. I didn’t know what to make of
that
but I certainly didn’t like it, any of it. Was he bona fide crazy? I set about deleting them until Courtney came up behind me, saw my screen and said, “Whoa!”
“Can you believe this guy?”
“Save them, Darcy. You might need to show them to someone.”
I twisted around to look up at her. Her expression was dead serious.
“Just in case,” she said.
I stopped deleting.
She leaned over me and commandeered my mouse. “Let’s make a file where you can stash them. Here.” She created a file called “Joke Coffin’s Dead Ends” and one by one dragged his missives into it. I changed the name to just “Dead Ends”, fearing Joe might see the file if he wheeled his cart too close one day.
He didn’t appear in the newsroom all morning though I imagined him checking his email repeatedly, expecting – actually expecting – a reply. Realizing this was significant for me because I was beginning to comprehend that Joe was not an
ordinary
man who had been rejected in an ordinary way by an ordinary woman who didn’t want to date him. He was somewhere on a spectrum from totally nuts to obstinately determined to get my attention in a way I had never before experienced.
Before meeting Hugo I had known a guy or two to turn up unexpectedly or call too frequently or not get the hint long after he should have that I wasn’t interested. Every woman went through this and knew that eventually the guy would back off. But Joe wasn’t backing off. By now I had stopped blaming his youth and decided he had some kind of personality disorder. “Asshole syndrome” Courtney called it and continued to urge me to wait and watch before deciding to go to Elliot or Human Resources with my problem. I hoped that a weekend away from the office, and me, might dampen his enthusiasm and decided to stick with my plan not to alarm the authorities at work by making a formal complaint, especially when our bones story was gaining momentum.
Abe Starkman finally called me back and though he didn’t say much, and what he said was practically whispered, he made a definite promise to “get it to you over the weekend”. He didn’t say what “it” was or where he would deliver it but finding me was fairly easy. He knew I lived in Brooklyn. He knew where I worked. He had to have read our story,
which
told him the
Times
was letting me run with it, and it didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out we could really break it open with substantiation of the land deal especially since we had already tracked down the bones. If he really wanted the whole thing exposed he would have to come up with evidence. And so I interpreted his cryptic assurance that “it” would be delivered as nearly a promise that he intended to produce some.
Courtney and I immediately set to work on a follow-up piece. Our publisher Matt Overly himself decided that it would run the next day. According to Elliot, Overly was receiving pressure from city officials – some of whom he socialized with – not to pursue the story. Overly was the thirty-five-year-old fourth-generation heir who had been appointed to run the
Times
when his father Sanford retired after himself having taken over from his father John who had taken over from
his
father Edmund who had founded the paper in the late 1800s. Matt Overly took seriously both his job and the claims that he was not up to it by dint of having had it handed down to him without ever having been a reporter or editor. And so when his social peers tried to exercise influence over his newspaper’s considerable power, it was a test. Since he had taken over the paper three years ago, his erratic decision-making had demonstrated his struggle as inner and outer forces tried to
sway
his every move: the desire to please pushed constantly against a wish for independence. His decision to run with a follow-up about the bones – a story he had been wary about only yesterday – demonstrated that he had been pressured to bury it and was willfully resisting that pressure.
It was good news for me and Courtney. Elliot instructed us to keep our reports spare and factual. We wouldn’t file until our 5 p.m. deadline in case there were new developments, a delay that allowed me to keep my regular lunch date with my mother.
She was waiting for me in the dining room where most of the other patients had already started their meal. It was a large, bright room with white-painted walls decorated with colorful framed museum prints, hanging plants in front of the wide windows, draperies pulled aside to let in the light and a shelf of pretty ceramics above the cupboards in the open kitchen. High-functioning patients shared a long table to the far left and a din of gentle chatter drifted across the room. My mother had long since graduated from that table to one of the small ones where I now found her sitting alone. She was surrounded by other small tables, islands of mostly silent patients concentrating on their food, chewing carefully, examining smells and textures as if cold cuts, cottage cheese and Jell-O were new culinary
inventions
. My entry created a pause in the clatter of utensils against plates as history-creased faces lifted to assess me. Who was I and why was I here? Eyes trailed me to my mother, watched me lean down to kiss her cheek and grasp her hands as they floated up to greet me.
“Hi, Mom.” I sat in the nearest chair.
“I’ve been waiting.”
“Not long. Lunch just started. I’m not late.”
She smiled without answering. More and more, even the simplest statements confounded her.
“I’m hungry,” I said. “Are you?”
“Yes. Lunch wasn’t filling today.”
“We haven’t eaten yet.” I turned to gesture to one of the attendants that we were ready for our food. The people who worked here could not have been more welcoming to family and always invited us to join meals and activities.
Sharing a meal with my mother was much like eating with a young child. Basic instructions were often necessary. Accidents happened. You couldn’t expect much by way of conversation and yet startling exclamations often took you by surprise. “Jackie O had the smallest waist of any woman I ever tailored,” my mother once blurted out over chicken salad. And I pictured the famous woman’s slender waist beneath my mother’s familiar hands and felt dual stabs of pride and jealousy. “Your
father
is the most tender lover I ever had,” as a cube of red Jell-O wobbled off her spoon.
Is
. And I sank into a well of remorse at the thought of him and the affectionate gestures that had spun a protective layer of sugar lace around my young heart, while also thinking,
What other lovers?
And I thought of Hugo and nearly cried. These lunches could be emotionally treacherous or unbelievably dull. Today’s was average, easy and fairly dull in a soothing way. Pleasant. There were no startling pronouncements or spills that made you jump out of your chair. We ate. Talked little. I walked her slowly back to her room. And then it was time for me to return to work.