Deadline (30 page)

What to think, I thought. Try
how
to think. But I fought off the urge to say it, too.

“I'm fine,” I said slowly, even coming up with a little smile. “I went off the road, up near Roxbury Pond. Hit some ice and off she went. I cut my hands up a little, but nothing serious. Just took me a while to get the car out. No big deal. I'm fine. I would have called, but the nearest phone was right here.”

Cindy looked at me, disappointed that I wasn't more severely maimed.

“Well, you don't look fine,” she said.

“A little worse for wear,” Vigue put in, eyeing me with that practiced cop's eye, listening with that cop's ear, that ear that can detect a lie intuitively.

Vern came out of the door and asked what happened, and I had to stand on the cold sidewalk, in the light showing from the front office, and give an abridged version of my already-abridged story.

“How's the car?” Vern said.

“Not too bad. Mostly the glass. I cut my hands on the window trying to get the damn door open. That's gonna be fun to replace. A driver's-side window for a sixty-four Volvo. How are you guys doing? Hope you didn't let my absence affect your production schedule. We've got a paper to get out.”

It fell flat. They all looked at me like I was either crazy or, in Vigue's case, lying, and I got the feeling that I'd better not make these mishaps a habit, or I'd start to lose their respect. But everyone is
entitled to one kidnapping and near-death from thugs and frostbite. Hell, in this town, maybe everybody was entitled to two.

A couple of people stopped—the guy from the florist's across the street, a retired guy who used to drive a truck for the town, and now had something to do with kids' football—so we started to go inside before we drew a real crowd. I was at the door when Vigue nodded toward the street.

“Got a sec?” he said.

I did, so we stood at the curb by his cruiser until the florist and the football guy moved on. Vigue touched his mike and said he'd be back on patrol, then lit a cigarette.

“Must have been a hell of a crash,” he said. “What'd you do? Cut yourself out with your wrists?”

I rubbed my wrists and stuck my hands in my pockets. “Ah, not as bad as it looks. I just slid off the road. I said turn and the car said no. Road curved and I went straight. Going a little fast for the conditions, as they say. Car's fine, really.”

Vigue looked at me, then looked away again.

“I know when somebody's bullshitting me, and you're bull-shitting me,” he said. “A car accident don't cut your wrists like that. Unless you get real depressed about the whole thing and decide to do yourself in. You got anything to tell me, you can tell me now. Or you can keep it. I'm not gonna drag it out of you.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Shoot yourself,” Vigue said.

He tossed the cigarette butt onto the street, where it scattered red sparks and then died.

“I think you're full of shit,” he said.

“Isn't that state police territory up there?”

“Unless there's some connection to Androscoggin, chappie. And something tells me you weren't tangling with a bunch of upcountry hillbillies. Am I right?”

I looked down the street.

“I'm not too popular in town right now,” I said. “People at St. Amand think I'm out to get the mill. And I think somebody ought to do something about Arthur getting killed, to be honest. People are calling my girlfriend. She's getting threatening letters. Then I was supposed to come in and file a complaint against Cormier, but I didn't. Stuff still happened.”

“Change your mind?”

“He's leaving town anyway,” I said. “Let him go.”

The radio in the cruiser bleated something unintelligible, like a message from a space alien.

“You can report all these things, you know,” Vigue said. “There's laws. Criminal threatening. Intimidating a witness. Assault. That's why they have laws.”

“Yeah, and one of them says you can't kill mild-mannered photographers. I'm going to write something about that one. Nothing personal. Directed at the state people more than you.”

“Ballsy bastard, aren't ya,” Vigue said.

“Not particularly.”

“No,” Vigue said. “Not at all. Well, let me tell you a couple of things, chief. I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I've been doing this job a hell of a long time, and I've learned a few things. The hard way sometimes. Like I know when somebody says ‘Nothin' personal,' it's time to bend over, 'cause they're gonna stick it to you good. And you're gonna say I'm not doing my job on this Bertin thing. Well, look at yourself. You write your little stories, but when
it's time to come forward and testify, it's ‘Oh, he's gonna leave town anyway.' Well, mister, don't tell me I ain't doing my job, because I can't do it alone. Nobody's coming in to tell me about what happened to Bertin. I got nothing. I can't make it up, like you. I got to have something to go on, and right now I've got a guy in a canal. That's it. And the guy was a fruitcake. You know it and I know it, so let's not kid ourselves. He was a few cards short of a deck, and he turned up dead, and if you've got any suggestion as to why, I'd be glad to listen.”

“What do I know about it?” I said. “Go out and talk to people. Talk to cab drivers. See if somebody dropped him off. See if the people in those pictures might have wanted him dead. Talk to Mrs. Wiggins, for God's sake. She hated the guy's guts. And she almost killed me without even trying. I don't know. Don't you think somebody ought to be doing something?”

“Yeah, and if I did all those things you're coming up with, I'd be right back where I started. Nowhere. Because Pauline Wiggins don't know nothing about nothing. You try ID'ing the people in those pictures. And I go up and I say, ‘Hey, this guy is dead, and he took your picture, even though you might not know it. So did you kill him or what?' Only place that works is in the movies.”

“Nothing works if you don't try it at all,” I said.

“Jesus,” Vigue said.

He opened the cruiser door and the heat rushed out.

“Hey, that's the way I feel,” I said. “It really isn't anything personal.”

“Hell, it isn't. Make me look bad, make the department look bad. Run our asses all day and night, trying to keep people happy, and then we get this crap in the paper.”

“But a guy died,” I said. “This is serious.”

“He was friggin' nuts,” Vigue snapped. “He could have been down there taking pictures of the moon. He could have been barking at the moon. Maybe he was looking at waitresses and he had to go jerk off. Maybe he got sick of jerking off and jumped. What I'm telling you is, sometimes you don't know. You can ask all the questions in the world and you still won't know, because nobody does. Except the deceased, and they ain't talkin'.”

Vigue got in the cruiser. The radio was squawking and snapping.

“The reason I was here was to tell you we need that complaint right away if the case isn't gonna get tossed out. But you don't need to know that now, right? No, you just have to write your stories. Must be nice.”

Well, not really.

No. It wasn't nice—not when you had to take all this insane stuff, and then you had to come back and write some news stories. Not when you spent half the day being kicked around and screamed at and beaten up, and then you had to come back and fill the paper. Then it was not nice at all. Then it was so far from nice that I didn't want to think about it.

With two days left, I'd written an editorial and Arthur's obituary. The rest of the news pages would be blank unless I filled them. I stood on the sidewalk in the cold, with my raw hands in my pockets, and watched until Vigue's taillights swung left at the end of the street. It must be nice, I thought, and then turned and walked into the office, emotionally drained and physically exhausted, and ready to write about a girl who had been nearly killed by a drunk driver.

A nice change of pace.

Actually, it was pretty mechanical. I called the hospital and got transferred from one person to another until a nursing supervisor
grudgingly told me that Lori Gamache was out of intensive care and in stable condition. I called the police station and asked for LeMaire, J., and they said he was off until Wednesday. I asked if they knew what Tansey had been charged with and they said I'd have to talk to LeMaire, J. or Vigue. I said I'd call back.

At six-thirty I started calling Roxanne, at the office and at home. No one answered at either number. I called every half-hour until nine o'clock, and in between, I called LeMaire, J. at home, where he said nothing had changed. I also called the girl's father at the hospital, asking for him by name and then waiting while they dragged him from some grim waiting room, or worse yet, from beside his daughter's hospital bed.

“Yeah,” he said.

The voice was lifeless, like it was a flower and the hope had been pressed out of it.

“Mr. Gamache, this is Jack McMorrow. From the
Androscoggin Review
. I'm sorry about your daughter, and I'm sorry to bother you. I just wanted to see how your daughter was doing. I was at the accident and—”

“You writin' a story?” he said.

“Yes, I am.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want to know how your daughter is,” I said.

“You wanna know? I'll tell you. My daughter is hooked up to machines. A whole wall of machines. She got tubes up her nose and in her arms and coming out of her belly. They say she's doin' okay considering her insides were crushed. I got no way of knowing. But I do know one thing. What'd you say your name is?”

“Jack McMorrow.”

“Well, Mr. McMorrow, this I know. That son of a bitch better pray for twenty years, because if he gets out, I'm gonna kill him. Put that in your goddamn story. He gets out, he's dead. He should have been dead a long time ago, 'cause he wouldn't stop until he hurt somebody, and now he's hurt my girl, and he isn't worth shit. If I could get my hands on him, I'd kill him right now. 'Cause my little girl never hurt nobody. She comes up to visit me and her mother. I don't dare to bring her mother in here 'cause she'd have a heart attack and die. I told her she could come tomorrow and she might die then. So put that in the story. I got nothin' more to say.”

I started to say I was sorry, but he had already hung up. I hung up, too, then went through my notes line by line, filling in the missing words, going over the words that were in shorthand. A relatively routine accident story had just become the lead of the paper. Right across the top of page one, a quote broken out next to the photo. The “tubes in her nose” quote? Or could I get away with the threats? Probably in the body of the story, but not in the head or in a break-out. The guy hadn't been convicted, after all. But I'd move it up high, get Gamache in the lead, and then use the quotes by the third or fourth graf. The human side of a drunk-driving accident. The raw agony of seeing a loved one injured. The senseless waste of drunk driving.

Next time I wanted to go for a drive with a beer, maybe I should think of Mr. Gamache.

But the story was good stuff, and I could feel my heart pounding, that eager bit-champing feeling that reminded me why I was in the business. New York. Boston. Androscoggin, Maine. It didn't matter where you were. A good story, a gut-kicking, hard-driving, knock-their-socks-off story, was the same no matter where you wrote it. The readers would not put this one down. They would not turn the page.
They would read every word and still want more. They would feel for the father, feel for the girl. They would hate the kid and call for his head. And the newspaper would be the catalyst for all of it, rubbing their noses in reality, forcing them to confront this tragedy.

That was our job. That was the true power of the press, and it felt good to be a part of it—so good, in fact, that for a moment, I forgot about my own troubles. I almost forgot about Roxanne.

With a twinge of guilt, I called her at the apartment. No answer. I called her at the office and got the answering service. I called her at home again. Still nothing. With the Gamache notes still in front of me, worry began to push aside euphoria. Would she go out alone? Maybe I should drive down … but how could I? Getting the paper out already was going to take a miracle. And I just couldn't. Physically, emotionally, I just couldn't. I should, but I couldn't.

I grabbed my parka and left, telling the room that I'd be back. It was cold on the ride home with the wind rushing through the broken window. I trudged up the stairs, exhausted and sore and numb. All I wanted was sleep. A hot shower and then into the sleeping bag. I opened the door and closed it behind me as I groped for the light switch, found it, and flicked it on.

And stopped.

I tried to speak but I couldn't. I walked to the living room. Touched her back. Her hair. I pulled the hair from her face.

“Baby,” I said. “Baby.”

21