Deadline (3 page)

The
Tribune
seemed hot to get him, and he needed the job. It had been six months since he had worked anywhere, and the novel he had planned to write just hadn’t worked out. Maybe he was only a reporter after all; maybe fiction was a step or two above him. So when Hiram Byrnes called, Dalton Walker jumped. The
Tribune
had been a smallish daily covering the mundane happenings of the Jersey outback, but last year it was absorbed into the Knapp newspaper chain, and now it had national pretensions. Knapp wanted to do in New Jersey what
Newsday
had done on Long Island: hard-hitting features of national interest that would go on the wire to Knapp’s ten other papers around the country. Hiram Byrnes had been hired away from the Los Angeles
Times
to oversee the frantic growth that followed.

That much Walker knew about the
Tribune.

Byrnes told him more. “People in this business get defensive about what they do. Sometimes it takes a load of dynamite to blast away those old ideas. You’ll see who the problems are for yourself before long. When Knapp took over, they swept out some good people along with the bad and brought in some bad people along with the good. Some in fairly strategic positions. My job is to get them the hell out of the way and make this thing a newspaper. You’re the first of my handpicked men. Walker, I’m telling you this because I want you here. I mean, I
really
want you here.”

Walker just looked at him.

“I don’t want you getting pissed off and quitting in the first ten minutes,” Byrnes said. “I know how many places you’ve worked and why you quit each one. I can’t tell you you won’t have those frustrations here too. I wish I could. All I’m saying is, if things start to get to you, take it up with me before you jump ship. Don’t feel that you were hired to win us a Pulitzer. I don’t want you working under that kind of pressure. You’re here to get good stuff in the paper, and that’s all you’re here to do. I want stuff that reads like a bastard, stuff that tears their goddamn hearts out.”

Walker stared into a dark corner and saw a tiny white face there.

“Stuff we’ll be proud to send down the wire to the chain,” Byrnes said. “That’s the only way I can make my case to old man Knapp when the chips are down.”

“I hear you,” Walker said.

“Great. The job’s yours. It was yours before you ever walked in. Any questions?”

“Who do I answer to?”

“The city editor is Joe Kanin, but I’ve told them to leave you alone. I asked Kanin to help get your legs under you, funnel a few good stories your way till you get used to working in the city again.” He picked up the telephone. “Margie, is Joe free yet?” A few moments later Kanin came in. He was a bald man of medium height and build. Walker sized him up at once as an enemy. Kanin’s attitude was one Walker had seen before, a coldness that telegraphed trouble.
All right, pal, you won the Prize, but I run the newsroom.
Walker had bucked that tide before.

Kanin ushered him out into the newsroom. Walker waited at city desk while Kanin dispatched a reporter-photographer team to interview more survivors for the second-day fire story. When they had gone, Kanin stood off and gave him a dose of the icy eye. Walker gave it back to him.

“What do they call you?” Kanin said. “Do you want to be called Dalton?”

“Walker’s fine.”

They made the rounds quickly. Kanin introduced him to everyone in the room, then gave him a desk in a far corner near a row of filing cabinets. It looked like a good place to be—out of the firing line, yet still in the newsroom. Close enough to pick up scuttlebutt, yet not so close that every assistant city editor with a two-headed dog would dump it on him. Byrnes could talk all day about leaving him alone, but Walker knew better.

He wasn’t in the newsroom long before that judgment was partly confirmed. He had just settled into his desk when Kanin came over with his first assignment. He sat on the edge of Walker’s desk, a scrap of paper in his hand. “Here’s one that’ll make a real
reader.
And it’ll get you down into the city.”

“I’ve been down in the city.”

Kanin ignored him. “How much do you know about the Amish, Walker?”

“They’re like Mennonites, aren’t they?”

Kanin smiled crookedly. “Not quite. The Mennonites are less strict than the Amish. The Amish are religious fundamentalists, but they’re also isolationists. They believe the old ways are better, in every facet of their lives. Their religion prohibits any kind of modern technology. Old World Amish can’t have cars. They’re mostly farmers, but they can’t use tractors—nothing powered by fuel, nothing with rubber wheels. They can’t have electricity in their homes. Dancing is prohibited, so is makeup. There is no interchange with other churches. What we have, in other words, is a horse-and-buggy society in the middle of the machine age. You follow me so far?”

Walker squinted. But he said, “I think so.”

“Hiram said you like stories with natural conflict, so try this one for size. At Radio City Music Hall there’s a girl dancing with the Rockettes who comes from an Old World Amish family. Maybe you don’t see the story in that, but believe me, it’s there. You have to understand about these people and how they raise their kids. Obedience to parents is like a commandment. To do what this girl has done would mean a total break from her family, excommunication from her church.”

“Lots of kids break from their families.”

“You haven’t been listening to me, Walker. Amish kids aren’t like other kids. They’re raised in such isolation that they don’t know how to cope with the real world. The parents won’t even let them go to school beyond the eighth grade, for fear they’ll be tempted by worldly pleasures. I want to know how this girl made the break. What kind of emotional hurdles she went through. How does she feel now? And how the hell did she learn to dance like that, after spending her first eighteen years milking cows and sewing quilts? You tell me, Walker, does that story have natural conflict?”

Walker had to admit that it did.

“It’s got another element, as I’m sure you know,” Kanin said. “Radio City is still glamour. It’s a national showplace. All this talk about closing it down has brought it into the limelight again. People want to read about it. They’re especially hungry for backstage stuff, because there’s a feeling afoot that it won’t be with us much longer. Combine the glamour, nostalgia and the girl with a Stone Age background and you’ll have a feature that any editor in the country would use. Helluva piece.” Kanin dropped a paper on Walker’s desk. On it was a name, which he read upside down as Diana Yoder.

“What’s the girl say?” Walker asked. “I can’t imagine she’d want to be interviewed about this.”

Again Kanin flashed that crooked smile. “If it were easy, I’d give it to one of the kids. See you later, Walker.”

He watched Kanin walk away, then took up the paper and looked at the name. Diana Yoder. Amish girl. Rockette.

It was a story, all right. No doubt about that, but it left Walker with the taste of salt on his tongue. The girl would tell him soon enough that her religion was her own business, and he would find himself agreeing with her. But he would do it anyway because he was a pro, and to some extent he lived by the code of the old-style reporter. You didn’t turn down assignments unless you had an understanding somewhere. His understanding included a certain up-front period of city desk hassle, so he would start on the Yoder thing tomorrow. He settled into his desk, filling the rest of the afternoon with calls to old friends: cops, politicians, contacts from his fiery youth. Some of them he had known at
Newsday,
long years before. He tried Al Donovan four times during the afternoon without success. Of all the cops he had known then, he had always liked Donovan best. Donovan had been with the FBI since 1939. Walker hadn’t talked with him in years, but he knew he would still find Donovan in that tiny FBI office in Brooklyn. Donovan had been there since the Red scare days, and they weren’t about to start moving him around now.

But Donovan was tied up for the day. When Walker tried his number the fourth time, the day was over. He would get Donovan another day. A few reporters dropped by to welcome him aboard; one or two came over just to size him up. One of the last to go was Frank Woodford, the old wire service man. He was plump and in his late forties, and he wore loud clothes.

Woodford said he was glad Walker was there, and he seemed to mean it. “This paper’s so gray it’s goddamn pathetic. We could use some bright stuff around here. Want to go for a beer?”

“Let me take a rain check. I’ve got a few more calls to make.”

“What’ll you be working on?” Woodford said.

“Whatever comes up.”

Woodford leaned close. “Listen, let me plant a bug in your ear.” He looked at Kanin, still busy across the room. “Don’t let Kanin stick you with that goddamn Radio City thing. He’s been trying to unload that for almost a year now. Gives it to every new hand who comes in.”

“What is it, some initiation joke?”

“Hell no, he’s as serious as a heart attack.” Woodford made a wry face. “Oh, hell, it’s a story all right, or would be if the girl would talk to anybody. If she even smells a reporter coming her way, she runs like hell. Kanin’s made her totally gun-shy. It’s one of them ungettable mothers.”

Walker didn’t believe in ungettable mothers. But he didn’t say anything.

“Kanin’s flipped on the girl,” Woodford said. “Ever since he first heard about her—must be ten, twelve months now. The funny part is, he’s never even laid eyes on her. Real strange. One time I got drunk with him and I just flat asked him about it. Turns out he’s from Amish country himself. He was born and raised on a farm in Indiana. When he was twenty he fell like a ton of bricks for this Amish girl. There was no way it could ever work out. Their religion forbids it, so the girl ups and marries someone else, some guy in her church. And old Joe winds up bald-headed and sour, pushing papers on city desk and giving people a bad time.”

“How’d he hear about her in the first place?”

“Same way you hear about everything. Knew somebody who knows somebody at Radio City. Um, here he comes.”

“How’s it going?” Kanin said, He looked at Woodford suspiciously.

“Fine,” Walker said. “I’m pretty well settled in. I can get started in the morning.”

Kanin nodded and looked at Woodford. “How you hanging on the fire story?”

Woodford shrugged. “Two more people died about an hour ago. That makes seventeen for tomorrow’s piece.”

“You coming in early tomorrow to put it together?”

“What else?” Woodford said. “Pretty cut-and-dried stuff,” he said to Walker. Then, to both of them, “There is one funny angle. One little girl. They haven’t identified her yet.”

Walker met Woodford’s eyes.

“They got all the adults named?” Kanin asked.

“Yeah, that’s the odd part. This kid must have come in with somebody who survived the fire.”

“How could that happen?” Kanin’s tone was short, impatient.

“Hey, don’t ask me, Joe. I just put ’em together, I don’t make ’em up.”

“Well, why hasn’t the mother turned up to claim the body?”

“That’s what the coroner wants to know.” Woodford shrugged. “People. Jesus, you never know what they’ll do.”

Walker leaned across the desk on a propped-up arm. “That’s a pretty strange angle, don’t you think?”

“It’s interesting,” Woodford agreed. “We’ll keep after it till they find the mother.”

“What if they don’t?”

“They will. Hell, they’ve got to.”

Walker looked at them for almost a full minute. “Well, I can’t imagine anything more important to a woman than claiming her dead daughter’s body. Any way you cut it, it’s a helluva story.”

“Maybe the mother doesn’t know yet. Maybe there isn’t any mother.”

“Everybody in town knows by now. And if there isn’t any mother, then what’s the rest of it? Who brought the kid to the circus and left her there dead?”

Woodford shrugged. “Look, all I do is put ’em together. I’ll let you guys play Hollywood dick.”

“Walker’s already got a story,” Kanin said.

“This one’s better,” Walker said.

“Believe me,” Kanin said. “They’ll find the kid’s mother by tomorrow morning. It’ll be an old-fashioned sob story, routine and quite ordinary.”

“If it is, I’ll buy you a lunch,” Walker said. “And I’ll get on over to Radio City.”

Kanin glared at Woodford, daring him to say anything. “I’d like you to get on over to Radio City anyway.”

Walker met his eyes. “We’ll see,” he said.

S
OMETIMES THERE ARE CASES
that no one can solve. Any coroner with a few years’ experience will tell you that. Depending on the size of his case load, there will usually be, in a year’s time, three or four or eight or ten bodies for which there are no easy answers. There is no identity, no past. Occasionally not even a cause of death.

Somehow Walker knew, from the moment Woodford opened his mouth, that the little girl’s case was going to be one of those strange ones. When there were still no leads on the little girl by noon of the next day, he knew he was right. The story slipped off the front page and became another tragedy soon forgotten, and Woodford went on to other things. But it hung there like a ripe plum. Walker thought about it at night, alone in his apartment, sipping bourbon and listening to Bach. The bare facts of the case made no sense at all. Even if there was no mother, seven-year-old kids do not lose themselves in the society. There are records, foster homes, places for kids like that; they do not exist independent of the society. In many ways, it would have been easier to trace an orphan than to locate a natural mother. The coroner tried. He was determined that he would not bury a seven-year-old Jane Doe. But he did, almost three months later, in the public graveyard where he had put so many faceless, nameless men.

Walker was there for the burial. He brought along a photographer from the
Trib,
and they covered the funeral just as if the little girl had been someone important. They were the only press there. It had long since become Walker’s story, worked in around his other assignments in brief ten-minute snatches of his day. Kanin kept him busy, and Walker on his own had turned up some good stuff. But the little girl was always with him. He had made daily phone checks with the coroner for three months, and now called the man by his Christian name. Walker knew the progress of the case as he knew few other things on this earth. Huge blocks of story, still unwritten but formed whole in his mind, were dammed up just under the surface. They needed only a lead to bring them out. Now Walker had his lead. It was a sad story, a crier, not the kind of thing he had envisioned when he had adopted it three months earlier, but a good tale nonetheless. Anything with that much mystery and pathos had to, as Hiram Byrnes put it, read like a bastard.