Jericho Iteration

5

(Thursday, 9:35 A.M.)

I didn’t remember falling asleep: that’s how drunk I got.

Sometime during the night I moved from my desk chair to my unmade bed. I was never conscious of the act; it had been reflexive action and not part of any deliberate decision to hit the sack. I simply blacked out at some point; the next thing I knew, a heavy fist was pounding on the apartment door.

“Rosen! Yo, Rosen …!”

Long, bright rays of sunlight were cast through the dusty loft windows. My eyes ached, my mouth tasted like the bottom of a cat’s litter basket, and my brain was stuffed with thousands of shorted-out wires. Somewhere out there, birds were chirping, bees were humming, cows were giving milk to blissful farm girls, happy little dwarves were humming as they marched in lockstep on their way to work.

But that was far away, because here in my rank loft, on this beautiful morning in late April, I felt like a hundred and eighty-five pounds of bat guano.

“Rosen! Get the fuck outta bed!”

I shoved away the blanket and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My right foot knocked over a half-empty beer bottle as I sat up; I watched as it rolled across the bare wooden floor until it bounced off the kitchen table and came to rest by the door, leaving a small trail of stale beer in its wake. Somehow, that seemed to be the most fascinating thing I had ever seen: an elegant demonstration of Newtonian physics.

“Rosen!”

“Okay, all right,” I muttered. “Don’t wet yourself on my account.” My legs were still functional, at least to the degree that I was able to stand up without a pair of crutches. I found an old T-shirt on the floor and slipped it on, then stumbled across the room to the door, twisted back the dead bolt and opened it.

Earl Bailey, two hundred and sixty pounds of malice stuffed into six feet and two inches of ugliness, was the last person I wanted to see while suffering from a hangover. He stood outside my door, glowering at me like I was a rat the exterminators had forgotten to kill. Not that the exterminators ever visited this building since he had owned it.

“What’s wrong with you?” he snapped. “I’ve been banging on the door for five minutes.”

I stared back at him. “Sorry, but I was taking a long-distance call from the president. He wanted to know if I would come over today to help him fight for world peace, but I told him I needed to deal with you first.”

Pearl’s fleshy nose wrinkled with disgust as he took a step back from the door. “Your breath stinks. You been drinking this morning?”

“No, but I was drinking last night.” I reached down to pick up the beer bottle I had knocked over. “I think there’s a little left,” I said, swirling around the half-inch of warm beer remaining. “Here, want some?”

“Lemme in here,” he growled, pushing my hand aside.

I stood back as he marched into the loft. He stopped in the middle of the room, his fists on his broad hips as he took in the clothes and empty pizza boxes heaped on the floor, the dead plants hanging from the rafters, the half-full carafe of cold coffee on the hot plate, the disarray of papers and books on my desk next to the computer. “Man, this place smells like a dumpster.”

“C’mon, Pearl,” I murmured, “who did you think you were renting to, the pope?”

“No. I thought I was renting to a responsible adult.” He looked back over his shoulder at me. “You told me you were going out to Forest Park to find a story.”

“I did. Got one, too.”

“Huh.” He walked over to my desk to gaze down at the books and papers. “Morning paper says there was an ERA raid at the park last night,” he said as he bent down to shove some trash into an overturned wastebasket. “The Post claims they arrested a bunch of people who were trespassing at the Muny.”

“That’s an understatement if there ever was one,” I said. “Did it say anything about shootings?”

He looked up at me, one eyebrow raised slightly in surprise. “Nothing about shootings. Why, did you see any?”

I shook my head. “No, but I heard gunfire. Sorry, but I didn’t stick around to-”

“Didn’t stop to see, huh?” He set the can upright and stood erect, dusting off his hands on his jeans. “Why didn’t you?”

I gently rubbed the back of my sore neck with my hands. “Well, boss, you know what they say about someone shooting at you. It’s nature’s way of telling you it’s time to go home.”

“Bullshit. You’re a reporter. First you get the story, then you worry about letting your ass get shot off.”

“Easy for you to-”

“But you didn’t see anyone get hit, right?” I shook my head, and Bailey closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Then there weren’t any shootings,” he said softly. “Not unless we can produce any bodies.”

“Ah, c’mon, Earl!” I shouted. “I was there. I heard the gunshots, for cryin’ out-”

“But you didn’t see anyone actually get hit, did you?” He stared back at me. “Oh, I believe you, all right … and, yeah, I think you were actually there, not just holed up here drinking yourself stupid.”

He walked over to the bed, picked up the pair of mud-caked boots I had struggled out of last night, and dropped them back on the floor. At least I had some tangible proof that I hadn’t blown off the assignment. “But unless you can find me a corpse with an ERA bullet lodged in its chest, you know what the stadium will say.”

I nodded my head. Yeah, I knew what the official spokesmen for the Emergency Relief Agency would say, if and when questioned about gunshots heard during last night’s raid. The troopers had been fired upon by armed squatters and had been forced to protect themselves. That, or complete denial, were the usual responses.

This wasn’t the first time ERA grunts had opened fire at unarmed civilians in St. Louis, yet no one, from the press to the ACLU, had yet to make a successful case against ERA on charges of unnecessary use of deadly force. Life in my hometown was becoming reminiscent of a third-world banana republic; allegations were often made, but material evidence had a habit of disappearing. So did material witnesses …

The local press was treading a thin line. Especially the Big Muddy, which was in the habit of intensively covering stories the Post-Dispatch only mentioned. The feds couldn’t cancel the First Amendment, but they could make life difficult for Pearl. Tax audits, libel suits … Bailey knew the risks of being a public nuisance, and he was being careful these days.

No proof, no story. Unproven allegations didn’t mean shit to him. I should have known better. “Aw, man, I’m sorry, Pearl. I didn’t-”

“Don’t call me Pearl,” he said. He hated his nickname, even though everyone used it. He glanced at his watch. “You were supposed to be at the staff meeting.”

“Oh … yeah. Staff meeting.” I sat down at my desk and rubbed my eyes. “When it’s supposed to start?”

“A half-hour ago. You missed it. That’s why I’m up here.” He started to walk toward the bathroom, then caught a whiff through the door and thought better of it. He cocked his thumb toward the john. “Is there anything alive in there?”

“Nothing you haven’t seen before.” I stood up from the desk. “Okay, I’m sorry for missing the meeting. I’ll come down right now-”

“Naw, man. If you came downstairs now, you’d only make everyone sick.” He shook his head in disgust, then favored me with a little smile. “You worked hard last night. Get a shower and put on some clean clothes.”

“Thanks. I’ll be down in a half-hour-”

“You’ve got fifteen minutes, and tell the president I think he’s a dickhead and I don’t believe in world peace.” His smile faded. “If I don’t see you in fifteen, you can begin updating your resume. Got it?”

“Got it.” I didn’t like the sound of that.

“See you downstairs.” He turned around and tromped back through the door. “And clean this shit up. It’s embarrassing … to me, at any rate.”

He slammed the door on the way out.

The offices of the Big Muddy Inquirer were spread across a large room occupying the second floor of the building, its various departments separated from each other only by cheap plastic partitions. The place resembled a lab maze for down-on-their-luck mice: computer terminals on battered gray metal desks, fluorescent lights hung from pipes and ductwork along the cobwebbed ceiling, checkerwork brick walls plastered with old posters for rock concerts. Near the stairwell leading to the front door was the personals desk, where a steady parade of lonely people visited to place their ads for other lonely people; at the opposite end of the room was the layout department, where a handful of bohemian graphic artists pasted up the pages within a perpetual haze of marijuana fumes, vented only by a half-open window. Radical chic long after it was chic to be radical and Tom Wolfe had gone to the great word processor in the sky.

Somewhere in the middle of the room was the editorial department: four desks shoved together in a small cubicle, with Horace-the paper’s unofficial mascot, a trophy-mounted moose head decked out in oversized sunglasses and a Cardinals baseball cap-standing watch over the proceedings. The two other staff writers were out on assignment, allowing John Tiernan and me a chance to have our own little staff meeting regarding the events of the previous night.

John was the oddest person working for the Big Muddy in that he was the only staffer who closely resembled a normal human being. At a paper where everyone drank or smoked dope or experimented with various bathtub hallucinogens, John’s only apparent vice was chewing gum. While most people reported to work in jeans, T-shirts, and football jerseys, and our arts editor frequently sported an opera cape and a pince-nez, John came in wearing a business suit, a button-down Oxford shirt, and a plain tie. Sometimes he wore sneakers, but that was as informal as he got. He wore his hair neither too short nor too long, shaved every day, and probably couldn’t say “shit” even if his mouth was full of it. He had a wife and a kid and two cats, lived in a small house in the western ’burbs, attended Catholic mass every Sunday morning, and probably gave the most boring confessions a priest had ever heard.

No one at the Big Muddy ever gave him flak about his straitlaced ways. John was not only tolerant of all the bent personalities around him, he was also the best investigative reporter in the city. Earl would have sold his own son into slavery before giving up John Tiernan to another paper.

“Did you get her name?” he asked once I had given him the rundown of the Muny raid.

“Uh-uh,” I replied. “I didn’t even get that good of a look at her, beyond what I just told you. But she didn’t belong there, man. She was no squatter.”

“Yeah. Okay.” John’s face was pensive. He had his feet up on his desktop next to his computer terminal; he opened his top desk drawer and pulled out a pack of gum. “But you say she knew me-”

“She knew your name, but not your face. How else could she have mistaken me for you?” John offered me a stick of Dentyne; I shook my head and he unwrapped the stick for himself. “Does she sound familiar?”

“I dunno. Could be anyone, I guess.” He shrugged as he wadded up the stick and popped it into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully as he used the computer’s trackball to save the story he had been working on. “And she said she wants me to meet her at Clancy’s tonight at eight?”

“Right, and not to believe any other messages you happen to receive from Dingbat …”

John grinned from one corner of his mouth. “Yeah, right. I suppose I’m not to believe anything I hear on the phone, either. Weird.” He shook his head, then dropped his feet from the desk and swiveled around in his chair to face the screen. “Well, I gotta finish this thing, then I’ve got a press conference to cover at noon …”

I snapped my fingers as another thought suddenly occurred to me. Chalk it up to my hangover that I buried the lead. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “one more thing. When I asked her what this was all about, she told me two words … um, ‘ruby fulcrum.’”

John’s hands froze above the keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen, but I could see from the change in his expression that he was no longer concentrating on the minor news item he had been writing.

“Come again?” he said quietly.

“Ruby fulcrum,” I repeated. “I checked it out with Joker, but it couldn’t tell me anything. Why, does that ring a bell?”

He dropped his hands from the keyboard and turned back around in his chair. “Tell me everything one more time,” he said. “Slowly.”

Let me tell you a little more about John Tiernan.

John and I were old friends since our college days in the nineties, when we had met at j-school at the University of Missouri in Columbia. We were both St. Louis natives, which meant something in a class full of out-of-staters, and we worked together on the city desk at the campus daily, chasing fire engines and writing bits. After we had received our sheepskins, I went north to work as a staff writer for an alternative paper in Massachusetts, while John remained in Missouri to accept a job as a general assignments reporter for the Post-Dispatch, but we had stayed in touch. We married our respective college girlfriends at nearly the same time; I tied the knot with Marianne two months after John got hitched to Sandy. Even our kids, Jamie and Charles, were born in the same year. Things go like that sometimes.

About the same time that I bailed out of journalism, John moved into investigative reporting for the Post-Dispatch. When I began to seriously consider getting Marianne and Jamie out of the northeast, John had urged me to return to St. Louis, saying that he could put in a good word for me at the Post-Dispatch. I went halfway with him; my family moved back to Missouri, but I decided that I had had enough with journalism. A New York publisher was interested in my novel-in-progress, and Marianne had agreed to support us during the period it took for me to get the book finished. John made the same offer again after he left the Post to go to work for Pearl, but I still wasn’t interested. The novel was going well, and I didn’t have any desire to go back to being a reporter.

And then there was the quake, and Jamie’s death, and my separation from Marianne, and suddenly I found myself living in a cheap motel near the airport with only a few dollars in my wallet. I did as well as I could for a while, doing odd jobs for under-the-table slave wages, until one morning I found myself on a pay phone, calling John at his office to ask if his offer was still valid and, by the way, did he know of any apartments I could rent? John came through on both accounts, and he probably saved my sanity by doing so.

This all goes to show that John Tiernan was my best friend and that there was little which was secret between us.

Yet there were secrets; John was a consummate professional, and good investigative reporters don’t discuss their work even with close buddies. I knew that John played his cards close to his chest and accepted that fact as a given, and so I wasn’t terrifically upset when he wouldn’t disclose everything he knew.

“This ruby fulcrum biz … it’s important, isn’t it?”

He slowly nodded his head as he rubbed his chin between his fingertips. “Yeah, it means something.” He gazed out the window at the gothic steeple of St. Vincent de Paul, rising above the flat rooftops a few blocks away. “It’s part of the story I’m working on right now … and I think I know the person you met last night.”

“A source?” I reached across him to the pack of gum and pulled out a stick. “I take it you haven’t met her.”

John shook his head. “Just a couple of anonymous tips that were e-mailed to me a few weeks ago. I can see how she might have confused you with me last night, since you were obviously waiting for someone at the gate, but …”

He shrugged. “Darned if I know how you got sent an IM meant for me on your PT. The prefixes aren’t identical. That’s never happened before.”

“Some kind of screw-up in the net. I dunno. I received a message meant for you by accident, and …”

We looked at each other and slowly shook our heads. Yeah, and the Tooth Fairy was my mother-in-law. The odds of a random occurrence like this were as likely as trying to call your mother-in-law and reaching an emergency hot line between the White House and the Kremlin instead. Yeah, it could happen … oh, and by the way, you’ve just won the Illinois State Lottery and you’re now a millionaire, all because you happened to pick up a lottery ticket somebody had dropped on the sidewalk.

Coincidence, my ass … and neither of us believed in the Tooth Fairy.

“Let me ask you,” John said after a moment. “If you saw this woman again, would you recognize her? I mean, you said it was dark and rainy and all that, but-”

“If we had gotten any closer, I would have had to ask her for a date. Yeah, I’d recognize her.” I unwrapped a piece of gum and curled it into my mouth. “Where do you think we’re going to find her? Go over to the stadium and ask if they busted any middle-aged black women last night?”

John smiled, then he swiveled around to pick up his leatherbound notebook from his desk. Opening the cover, he pulled a white engraved card out of the inside pocket and extended it to me. “Funny you should ask …”

I took the card from his hand and looked at it. It was a press invitation to a private reception at some company called the Tiptree Corporation, to be held at noon today. I turned the card over between my fingertips. “Here?”

“Here,” he said. “She works for them.”

Coincidence City.

“But you don’t know her name …” He shook his head. I turned the card over and noticed that it was addressed personally to him. “Wonder why she didn’t just tell me she’d meet you at this reception.”

“There’s good reasons,” he replied. “Besides, she probably didn’t even know I was going to be there. The company probably sent a few dozen out to reporters in the city-”

“And I didn’t get one?” I felt mildly snubbed, even though I was fully aware that it was only senior reporters who got invited to things like this.

“It’s just one of those brie and white wine sort of things …”

“But I love cheese and wine.”

“Yeah, nothing gets between you and cheese.” I gave him a stern look, and he met it with a wide grin. Friendship means that you don’t deck someone for making asshole remarks like that. “Anyway, another one was sent to Jah. Apparently they want a photographer on hand. If you can finagle the other invitation from him …”

“I’m on it.” I stood up, heading for the back staircase leading to the basement. “When are you leaving?”

John glanced at his watch. “Soon as you get back up here. It’s out in west county somewhere, so we’ll have to drive. Don’t stop for coffee.”

“Not even for tea. I’ll see you out front in fifteen minutes.” John gave me the thumbs-up and I went straight for the stairs.

Pearl didn’t glance up from his desk as I slipped past his cubicle; for a moment I had the guilty notion that I should drop by, knock on the door, and tell him where I was headed. But if I did, he would probably insist that I stay put in the office until I had met the deadline for my column, even if it was more than twenty-four hours away. The notion, along with the guilt, quickly evaporated. My column could wait; for the first time in months, I had a real story to pursue, even if it was John’s byline that would appear on the final product.

I wanted a hot story.

For my sins both past and future, I was given one. When it was all over and done, I would never want to tag along on another assignment again.