Basket Case (25 page)

My spine turns into an icicle.

"Someone like who?"

Anne shakes her head. "Don't do this, Jack."

"Come on. Who died at forty-seven that I would possibly fixate on?"

Angrily she drops my hand like it was a hot coal. "Here we go again. That goddamn job of yours… "

"You're winging it," I tell her, definitely asking for trouble. "You're blowing smoke. You can't give me one name, can you? Not one."

She grabs the empty vodka glass and steams for the kitchen.

"Anne!"

"Jack Kerouac," she calls over her shoulder.

And I hear myself muttering, "Oh Christ."

19

I couldn't sleep last night so I drove back to Beckerville in a rainstorm at two in the morning. Janet's Miata was filling with water in the driveway and the house was exactly as Emma and I had left it. Incredible: The cops never showed up. I thought about calling 911 again, but decided to hold off.

Now I'm at my desk in the newsroom, looking at a picture of Jack Kerouac on the Internet. He's standing beside a desert highway, his shoulders rounded and hands shoved into his pockets. The biography accompanying the photograph divulges that English was his second language, and that he wrote On the Road in three weeks. It's enough to sink me into a funk of disconsolate envy. Reading on, I see that Anne was correct: the man punched out at age forty-seven. I seem to recall that he drank himself into a mortal spiral, and this detail is also confirmed. I will cling to it like a chunk of driftwood for the next twelve months, uplifted by the knowledge that this particular Jack wasn't taken randomly from life; he delivered himself free of it. He wasn't shot by a crazed fan or flattened by a runaway Winnebago or bitten by a Texas sidewinder. He boozed himself to death, a fate that I'm unlikely to replicate, given my tendency to fall into a snoring coma after three cheap vodkas.

So there.

From across the newsroom I hear a familiar, tubercular hacking: Griffin, the weekend cop reporter, sneaking a smoke. It's unusual to find him working so late.

"Three domestics," he explains in a tone of infinite boredom. "Knife, gun and claw hammer. Two 'graphs each. What the hell're you doing here?"

Griffin favors solitude. He has his own special way of working the phones. On impulse I ask: "Is there anybody worth a shit at the Beckerville substation?"

"Sure." With a pencil he laconically stirs a cup of black coffee. "Sure, I got a sergeant up there on night shifts. He'll talk to me." Translation: He's my source exclusively, so don't bug me for the name.

"You got time to make a call?"

"All depends, Jack."

I'm careful not to tell old Griffin too much. After I'm finished he squints up and says: "What're you working on? I thought you were still stuck on obits."

"Sad but true."

"So who's this 'Evan Richards' I've been reading?"

"Just an intern," I assure him. Griffin is always alarmed by new bylines in the newspaper.

"Ivy League, am I right? Where else do they go for a name like 'Evan'? I'm guessing Columbia or Yale."

"Bingo," I say. Griffin is good. "The kid's helping out Emma while I chase down this story."

"Must be a good one for her to cut you loose."

"I wish I could tell you more but I can't."

Griffin is cool with that; after twenty years on the police beat, he's at ease with secrecy. "So you want to know what happened with this Janet T-H-R-U-S-H. Spelled like the bird, right? You got a date of birth?"

"No, but here's the address. A 911 call was made to the sheriff's office but it doesn't look as if they sent anyone to the house."

"Lazy humps." Griffin plucks the paper bearing Janet's address from my fingers. "I'll get back to you."

Over the next few hours I make four trips to the vending machines and knock out seven paltry inches of background filler for the MacArthur Polk obituary. My brain is working like cold sludge:

Polk learned the newspaper business from his father, Ford, who founded the Union-Register as a weekly in 1931. The front-page headline in the debut edition: jellyfish bloom closes silver beach.

As Florida's coastal population exploded, the Union-Register broadened its circulation area and its mission. In January 1938 it added a midweek edition during tourist season and by the winter of 1940 the paper was publishing daily. "The Brightest News Under the Sun," proclaimed the motto beneath the masthead.

Ford Polk gave no special treatment to his only son, who started in the newsroom as a telephone clerk and eventually worked his way up to managing editor. When his father retired unexpectedly to breed dwarf minks, MacArthur Polk was given the helm of the Union-Register.

That was in 1959, and within a decade he had doubled its readership. His formula for success was simple, Polk later recalled. Serious readers were given plenty of aggressive local reporting; everybody else got color comics.

"We turned the paper into a first-class outfit," Polk said in a candid interview, --weeks before his death. "I always believed we should be the conscience of our community."

But in May 1997, conscience and class fell victim to slavering greed when Polk sold the Union-Register to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for $47 million. Almost immediately the newspaper took a screaming nosedive into the shitter…

I hear a gasp and spin my chair. It's young Evan Richards, ever the early bird.

"Jack, can you say that in the paper? 'Shitter'?"

"The last intern caught reading over my shoulder is now writing press releases for homeopathic penile enlargers."

Evan tests me with a tentative smile. "Man, you look like you've been at it all night."

"Know who Cleo Rio is?"

"Yeah, the chick that did the 'Me' song."

"Right."

"And flashed her pubes in the video. She's way hot."

"Sorry, Evan, but those were stunt pubes."

"Get out!" he says, goggle-eyed.

"Trust me."

"No way!"

"How'd you like to meet her?" I ask. "Sort of."

"Sweet," Evan says. "You're not kidding? Cleo Rio?"

"In the flesh."

Charles Chickle, Esq., says he was expecting my call—a baffling remark. Did Janet Thrush tell him I was investigating her brother's death? Does he already know something has happened to her?

We're chatting in his law office, which features a Picasso and a stuffed peacock bass on the same wall. Charlie Chickle has thinning silver hair, a ruddy face and sly blue eyes. He's wearing an expensive gray suit, a burgundy silk tie and a University of Florida class ring on one of his chubby fingers. Mounted under Plexiglas on a corner of his desk is an orange and blue football autographed by Steve Spurrier, confirming Chickle as a diehard Gator. That would explain his mystic political connections.

"So," he says, "you saw our friend Mac at Charity."

"Mr. Polk?"

"Of course. How'd he look?"

"Absolutely terrible," I say.

Chickle is amused. "For what it's worth, Jack—may I call you Jack?—in fifteen years I've never seen him look like he would make it through the night. But don't be fooled, he's one tough sonofabitch." The lawyer opens a manila file on the desk. "I've got depositions in an hour. Shall we get right to it?"

"I think there's been a misunderstanding."

"That would've been my reaction, too," says Chickle. "You probably thought he was nuts. That's what I thought, too. But he's not nuts, Jack, he's just vengeful."

Now I get it: Charlie Chickle is also MacArthur Polk's attorney. He doesn't know the latest about Janet Thrush; he thinks I've come to discuss the old man's business proposition.

"Before we—"

"Please." He raises a calming forefinger. "I know you've got questions but I'll answer most all of 'em, you give me a chance."

"I'm listening."

"As you know, Mr. Polk sold the Union-Register to Maggad-Feist a few years back. In return he received a considerable heap of company stock and a series of options, which he's purchased during the last six months to add to his holdings. The total held by Mr. Polk comprises roughly ten percent of all outstanding Maggad-Feist shares—a formidable slice of the pie."

The old man had told me eleven percent, not that it matters.

Chickle proceeds: "Last year, two publishing companies independently started buyin' up Maggad-Feist stock, each with an eye toward a takeover. One is a German outfit whose name I can't pronounce and the other is Canadian, Bachman something-or-other. Anyhow, they got Race Maggad scared good and shitless, so he does what? Starts buying back blocks of Maggad-Feist as fast as he can. Meanwhile the price goes up and naturally some investors are sitting on their holdings, waitin' to see if there's a bidding war and so forth. You with me?"

"Yeah. Maggad wants Polk to sell back his shares."

"In the worst way, Jack. Failing that, he wants the old man to put in his will that Maggad-Feist gets first crack at the stock after he dies. Now," Chickle says, glancing up from the file, "Mac Polk wouldn't cross the street to piss on Race Maggad if he was on fire. I don't need to tell you that, do I? The old man is of the belief that Maggad-Feist has plucked his beloved newspaper like a Christmas goose. Some days he won't even look at the front page, on doctor's orders, case he busts a valve."

"You'll forgive me," I say to the lawyer, "if I don't get all choked up. What was Polk thinking when he sold the Union-Register to these creeps? All you had to do was look at what they'd done to their other papers."

"Everybody screws up, Jack. I don't think Mr. Polk would mind if I told you he was given certain assurances by the Maggad family—ironclad assurances, or so he believed, about how the newspaper would be operated. Now he feels deceived," Chickle says, "and, as I said, vengeful to the extreme."

"Which is where I come in?"

"That's correct."

"So he wasn't just ranting, that day at the hospital?"

"Oh, I'm sure he was." Chickle nods fondly. "And I'm equally sure he was sane and sober. He told you about the trust?"

"He did. I said I'd think about it."

"Good answer. It tells me that money isn't what makes you tick." Chickle keeps talking as he leafs intently through more papers. "When Mr. Polk dies, all his shares of Maggad-Feist will automatically be put into a trust. As trustee, your duties would be relatively simple: Keep the stock away from Race Maggad. Throw away his letters. Ignore his phone calls. And when the proxy notices arrive, always vote the opposite of what the Maggad-Feist board recommends. The job description, in a nutshell, is to make Mr. Maggad miserable. Jerk him around at every available opportunity. Does that appeal to you?"

"For a hundred grand a year—he was serious about that, too?"

"Trustees are entitled to a fee, Jack. Some banks would charge much more."

I'm enjoying this conversation, as surreal as it is.

"Why can't his wife be the trustee?"

"Oh, she could," Charlie Chickle replies. "Ellen is a real spitfire. But Mac doesn't want her hassled day and night about selling the stock. He says you, on the other hand, shouldn't mind. He says your opinion of Race Maggad is almost as low as his."

"And I have been chosen because… ?"

"Because it will infuriate Mr. Maggad. I'm given to understand that he loathes you."

"Intensely," I say.

"Mac has no children, as you know. That means Ellen will be the ultimate beneficiary of the trust, when and if the stock is sold. What's so funny?"

"I'm trying to imagine the circumstances under which the old man would want me to sell his shares to young Master Race."

"As a matter of fact, the circumstances are quite specific. I could tell you what they are"—Chickle checks his wristwatch—"but that's for another day, when we're farther along."

"Charlie, tell me what you think of all this."

The lawyer rubs a pudgy knuckle across his chin. "Mr. Polk knows my opinion of his little scheme and he's chosen to march ahead. Oh, it's perfectly legal, Jack, if that's your concern. And I'd be lying if I said it hasn't been amusing, drawing up these papers. Probate work isn't usually a laugh riot. Neither is your job, I imagine, writing obituaries all day long."

Chickle intends no insult, but I feel my neck flush. "You've got a real nice touch," he adds. "You've given a few of my favorite clients a lovely send-off. I'm sure you'll do the same for Mac."

"He may outlive all of us."

"Ha. I doubt it," Chickle says mirthlessly. He rises and I do the same. "It was a pleasure, Jack. Call me when you make up your mind."

"There's one other matter."

He frowns apologetically. "Is it super important? Because I'm really short on time—"

"It's life or death, Charlie. I'm working on a story about Janet Thrush's brother."

The lawyer's face crinkles around the eyes. "What kinda story?"

"Not a happy one. We're looking into the circumstances of his drowning in the Bahamas."