Deadline (7 page)

He decided to test her. “Forty-five’s a bit steep.”

She shrugged. “What do you think’s fair?”

He moved through the rooms. The house was of the same general construction as the Gunther place, undoubtedly built by the same contractor at the same time. The birth of mass production.

“I was thinking more on the order of thirty.”

“All right.”

She had taken him by surprise. “All right what?” he said.

“All right thirty. You can have it for that.” She lit a cigarette and walked to the window.

“Just like that?”

“What more is there?”

He pushed her a little harder. “Even at thirty it’s no prize.”

He was looking down the hall toward the back door. For a moment she didn’t respond, and when he turned again two streaks of tears had begun trickling down her cheeks. Her hands were trembling. She looked away quickly, toward the street, and dried her eyes with the back of her hand.

“I owe the bank eighteen on it,” she said. “I’ll need some cash on top of that, say four, five thousand, to clear up some things. Twenty-three, Mr. Webster. Is that cheap enough for you?”

“It’s too cheap, Mrs. Baker. I’ll be in touch.”

There was something wrong with these people, all three of them. It went far deeper than a little girl’s death in a circus fire, but he still didn’t know what direction it was going to take next. All he knew for sure was that they had taken the same crisis and reacted to it in different ways. Mrs. Gunther was wound tighter than a drum. Her husband tottered on the brink of violence. And in the agonized eyes of Melinda Baker, Walker had seen the deepest fear he had ever known.

W
ALKER AND A GUY NAMED
Larry Burke sat in an unmarked car up the street and across from the Gunther house. Burke, who was the
Tribune
’s best photog, screwed a long lens into his camera while they waited. It was very early on a Monday morning; the sun hadn’t yet broken above the rooftops to the east. The house looked empty and dark. The green-and-white Ford was sitting in the driveway.

In the
Trib
car, Burke sat under the wheel, slouching, two cameras draped around his neck. Walker knew Burke didn’t like it. Photographers never like a blind assignment—it took away more option than photogs liked to give up. Photogs liked to run their own show. They wanted you to tell them what the story was, no more, then get the hell out of the way and let them shoot it the way they wanted. That was how the good ones worked. They were often difficult and sour, especially in situations where their talents were subordinated to those of the reporter. Walker had a theory. If you could measure a photog’s bile, you could measure his worth. The sour faces usually produced the golden eggs.

Larry Burke was one of the sourest he had seen in a long while. Burke, too, had won national awards. He had been with the
Tribune
two years, and had a natural antagonism toward pencil men. The argument was always about who had the tougher job. Walker thought the photog’s life incredibly soft and cushy. They had no idea what real work was. Like the guy in Texas who had won a Pulitzer for being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time and snapping his goddamn camera at the exact moment when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Sure, it was a good picture. It was a great picture, but how could you measure an incredible stroke of luck like that against the hours and days and weeks of mental torture that Walker had endured to win his Prize? But if it made Burke feel better, then fine, let him consider writers his creative and intellectual inferiors.

“We are the only objective historians,” Burke had shouted one night in the heat of a barroom argument. Walker had been sitting at the bar, twenty yards away and not involved in the discussion. But something about Burke’s arrogance got to him that night, and he whirled on his stool and said, “Bullshit,” just loud enough for everyone in the place to hear. The conversation came to a sudden halt, and Walker figured he might as well speak his piece. He stood and went over to Burke’s table. “You know that’s bullshit, Larry. Are you gonna tell me you never exercise any judgment in your work? That you just take what the camera sees? You gonna tell us you don’t decide what to shoot and how to shoot it, and what to leave out of the goddamn picture? Or when you get back in that darkroom, you don’t mess with it a little, to bring things out a certain way? You gonna tell us you don’t crop the mothers, and then, after all that’s done, you don’t pick just the right ones, from that stack of maybe fifty pictures, to give to the desk? Bullshit,” he said again, and walked out.

They hadn’t spoken to each other since, and didn’t speak now. The sun was up and the street was bathed in pink. Burke had rolled down his window and was looking through his lens at Gunther’s front door when Walker heard the sound of someone coming along the street behind them. It was Melinda Baker, coming fast.

“There’s the girl,” Walker said. Burke eased himself around in the seat and shot five full frontal face shots before Walker drew in his next breath. With the other camera, Burke took longer shots of the street scene, and Melinda Baker walking under the trees. As she passed them, Burke got her profile with the big lens. He even took a few of her back as she walked away from them.

After perhaps ten minutes inside the Gunther home, Melinda Baker came out with the Gunthers and they all got into the Ford. They were there in the early sunlight for just a few seconds, but in that time Burke shot the roll. The Ford backed out of the driveway and Burke started the car. They went south, then east toward Manhattan, and Burke followed with the skill of an old cop. Walker didn’t ask how Burke had learned to tail people. The less you know about some people the better.

They went to the Bristol-Myers plant, parked in a lot nearby and went into the building. Melinda Baker was wearing a dress; the Gunthers were dressed in work clothes. Burke shot and shot until they had disappeared inside and there was nothing left to shoot.

“Now what?” It was the first thing Burke had said to Walker all morning.

“Back to the
Trib,
” Walker said.

Burke just glared at him.

That night Walker had his first date with Diana Yoder. They went to a restaurant off Central Park and later to the New York Philharmonic. Symphony music bored Walker after a while, but being with her made up for it. After the concert she took him by her place for some talk and coffee. She didn’t offer him anything alcoholic; he didn’t see any booze anywhere in her place. There were no ashtrays. It was a simple apartment in the Sixties, a few blocks from the park. Her bedroom contained a small TV and a wall of books, mostly history. There was a small single bed, as in a nun’s cell. He found her mind alert and challenging. There may have been things she didn’t know at least something about, but he didn’t find them on that first date. She talked with ease about everything from jazz to current affairs. But she wasn’t authoritative or demanding. She challenged him without interrupting or raising her voice, simply by offering slants that perhaps he hadn’t considered. There seemed to be only one passion in her life, the proposition that women should be equal with men and they still had a long way to go. She found the hard-line feminists as arrogant and shallow as that unbearable housewives group that was working so hard and so dishonestly to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment.

Briefly she even talked about herself. She had had some instruction in tap dance, jazz and ballet. She admitted that she had started late. When he asked how she had done it, she said, “I worked like crazy,” and moved along to something else. He never did learn her age. He learned nothing about her family, and was a little afraid to ask. When the evening was over, he knew it without being told. He left with little fanfare, and didn’t try anything, not even a light kiss. She wasn’t a cold person; he could see that. But there was something about her that completely precluded any such attempts.

Later, alone in his apartment, he couldn’t recall one time when their hands had touched.

In the morning, Burke’s pictures were waiting on his desk. Burke had printed fewer than ten, but they were fine, as clear and detailed as Walker knew they would be. The first Melinda Baker shot was especially compelling. Burke had caught her in one brief moment with her glasses off. She looked to be about two feet away, staring right into their faces.

Nor was there any mistaking the gaunt, strained faces of Hal and Barbara Gunther. With the long lens, Burke had captured a tension between them that Walker hadn’t noticed from the car. They looked angry, as if they had been arguing.

He called Donovan at the FBI and set up a lunch for noon. Walker made the trip over to Brooklyn and they went to a Mexican joint where Donovan had been eating for fifteen years.

Walker showed him the pictures.

“Given the names and addresses of these people, what are the chances of getting a full make on all of them?”

“How far back?”

“As far back as they go.”

“Sure, we could do that. Is that what you’re asking? I mean, are you doing a feature on the investigative prowess of the FBI? Or are you actually asking me to do your work for you again?”

Walker looked pained. “Al, would I do that?”

“The question is why, old friend? Give me a good reason why I should dig up a couple of private lives for you. The Bureau gets touchy about that these days. Tell me something, Walker. These people in trouble?”

“I think they are.”

“Federal trouble?”

Walker shrugged.

Donovan shuffled through the pictures. “So you finally got off the circus fire, huh, Walker?”

Walker shook his head. “Same story.”

Donovan stroked his chin. “That’s damned interesting.” Donovan looked through the pictures again. He stopped at the close-up of Melinda Baker. “This wouldn’t be the kid’s mother, would it?”

Walker didn’t say anything. Donovan passed the pictures back across the table. For a while they didn’t speak. Finally Walker said, “It’s strictly QT, Al. You’ve got to promise me that.”

Donovan smiled. “Of course.”

“That’s the kid’s mother.”

“Well, well, well,” Donovan said. He picked up the pictures again, and looked for a long time into the eyes of Melinda Baker.

“No use asking,” Walker said. “I don’t know any of the answers yet. That’s why I need some help now. I need to know as much as I can before I confront them.”

“Just remember, I’ve got to answer to people too,” Donovan said. “For you this is a great story. For me it’s just another interesting case for somebody else. It’s strictly state, pal.”

“Call it a favor then,” Walker said. “Say it’s one I really owe you. Or can I extract payment for all these goddamn lunches I’ve been buying you?”

Donovan seemed to be pondering it.

“You still coming over Friday night?”

“Wouldn’t miss it. I might have somebody to bring, too.”

“I’ll tell Kim to set another place, just in case.”

Several minutes passed.

“Al?”

“Yeah, Walker?”

“How about the pictures? Will you check ’em out?”

“Sure,” Donovan said, smiling. His hands closed over the pictures and again he locked eyes with Melinda Baker, for the longest time. “I’ll check ’em out.”

I
T WAS TAKING A
while, but sometimes these things did. Even the FBI, with all its resources and manpower, often came up a day late and a dollar short. Donovan knew from long experience that you never got anywhere in the Bureau by being pushy. Push always had to come from above; then all manner of good things would happen. Cracks would open where there had been only a solid wall before. The bowels of bureaucracy would begin to move, as one of Donovan’s younger colleagues liked to say, and the case would get off the pot. With the matter of Walker’s pictures, that hadn’t happened and wasn’t likely to happen. Donovan had sent the pictures on to the main New York office. He didn’t give them much thought, except for the few minutes each day when Walker called to check on possible progress. With each passing day, Walker sounded more and more uptight, as if sitting on the big story was taking its toll. It probably was. Donovan had never met a reporter who could stay calm after giving up some of his unwritten story to someone else. Even if that someone were a blood brother, or a trusted best friend, the nervousness persisted until the story got in print, at which point it was promptly wrapped around a fish and forgotten. Long ago Donovan had decided that journalism, despite the strange lure it had for young men starting out in life, was just no place for a civilized human to work. It was like that old saying: there are two things a civilized man should never watch being made, sausage and war. Donovan would add a third: a reporter making his big story.

He liked reporters, and he especially liked Walker, but Donovan wouldn’t trade places with him even for the more than twenty years that separated them. Donovan liked his job. It had as much glamour as Walker’s, if that was what you wanted. Yes, there was a routine; yes, things sometimes got tedious and boring; and yes, his superiors were probably as insufferable as Walker’s. But you never really knew what might happen in the next five minutes. If uncertainty was his cup of tea, the Bureau gave a man that. Not to mention the amenities: a salary that was better than most (certainly better than anything Walker could make); security (you really had to screw up to get fired); a sense of accomplishment (Donovan felt like a vital cog in the American wheel, no matter what had been said to discredit the Bureau in recent years); and yes, goddammit, dignity. People still respected the FBI. They might tell George Gallup or Louis Harris they didn’t, but Donovan didn’t believe the polls. He knew that a man might tell a pollster one thing, and tell his wife something else.

Still, he understood Walker’s impatience, but by Friday even Donovan wondered what was taking so long. He had given the pictures to an old friend named Virgil Craig, who had been with the Bureau even longer than Donovan. Craig was sixty-four, three years older than Donovan, and would be retired next year. Donovan and Craig shared a camaraderie with other Special Agents of their age and longevity. Once a month he tried to make it over to Manhattan for lunch with Virgil Craig and a few of the old heads, some of whom had been out of the Bureau for years. They knew they could count on each other for honest opinion and for material favors, done quickly and without a lot of noise. They were the Manhattan Boys, all serving time in the New York field office at one time or another. New York was the pits to young men making their names in the Bureau. But to the old hands, it was home.