Killer Waves (3 page)

Chapter Two

The offices of
The Tyler Chronicle
are set on one floor of a two-story white clapboard building near the center of town, right by the town common. The newspaper office shares space with a dentist, a legal firm and a realtor, and on this late morning I parked out back, near a set of old B & M Railroad tracks. I noted Paula Quinn's Ford Escort was there, and I ducked in through the rear entrance, the door usually reserved for staff. I didn't want to go through the front door and the hassle of dealing with whatever receptionist happened to be working this month.

Once inside, I went past the subscription area and piles of bundled newspapers and found Paula at her desk. There were no cubicles or private office areas, just a wide area of industrial strength green carpet and metal and wooden desks that didn't have a chance of being matched. A couple of other female reporters-freelancers whose names I forgot about thirty seconds after meeting them-worked at their desks, typing hesitantly on the Digital computer terminals. Paula was on the phone as I came up to her, and sat down at a spare chair and looked around

Up toward the other end of the large area, near a closed for the conference room, something new was hanging from the tile ceiling. I folded my arms and looked it over. It was the front pages of the two local daily newspapers that the
Chronicle
was competing against, the
Porter Herald
and
Foster's Daily Democrat
, and each front page had been mounted on cardboard. Stuck through the center of each front page was a plastic dagger, and some red fluid had been smeared across the newspaper, suggesting blood. Considering what I had seen not more than eight hours earlier in a certain rental car, the color wasn't even close. Suspended below the front pages was a small plastic banner stating: IT'S WAR!

Below this delightful little display was the unoccupied cluttered desk of the paper's editor, Rollie Grandmaison, and I also noted a new desk had been butted up against Rollie's. While Rollie's desk was messy and piled high with newspapers, press releases, envelopes and other editorial debris, the companion desk was a shiny black behemoth that was empty except for a telephone, a computer terminal, two pens, a pencil and a legal pad.

By now Paula was saying, "Uh-huh, uh-huh," in the kind of tone that meant she was desperately trying to get away from whomever she was talking to but at the same time didn't want to tick off by being too dismissive. She caught my gaze and rolled her eyes upward, and I gave her a smile. She had on tight dungarees and a simple black sweater with a faux pearl necklace, and her blond hair this spring had been trimmed back somewhat. Still, her ears stuck through the side of her hair in a manner I round charming and that she found distressing. There was a smudge of newsprint ink on her slightly pug nose and I had a quick urge to wipe it clean with a soft touch of my thumb.

Instead, I leaned over and said in a loud voice, "Paula, editorial meeting in thirty seconds. Don't be late!"

She grinned at me and then said, "Well, Chick, you heard the word.  Gotta go.  Bye.”

Paula dropped the phone down and said, “Jesus, thanks a lot, Lewis.  That woman can talk a hole through a tin pot.”

“Somebody important?”

“Oh, she thinks she’s important, which is all that counts.  She's the new day dispatcher from Wentworth County. Thing is, if I can keep her happy and glad to talk to me, then I can get better news about what's going on in the other towns, like Bretton and Eaton. Otherwise I'd have to spend half the day trekking back and forth to county dispatch, seeing what happened the previous night."

I remembered our long conversation from the previous night at my house about her and her job and the changes contained within, before the space-shuttle launch and before my long trek out to the state wildlife preserve. I motioned to the two newspaper front pages hanging from the ceiling.

"More motivational signs from the new regime?"

Paula leaned back in her chair, her own computer terminal at her elbow. Her desk was as cluttered as Rollie's. "New regime. Yeah, I like that word. Regime. Makes me think about the guillotine coming out, the nobility and merchant class being obliterated."

"How's Rollie doing?"

"Rollie? A company man through and through. He's a few years away from retirement, and if the new powers-that-be told him to start putting alien babies and Elvis sightings on the front page, he'd snap to it and make me paranormal editor."

Somewhere a phone started ringing and then was picked up. "Okay, more important. How are you doing?"

She started playing with a pen on her desk. "Like I said last night. I'm doing okay. It's just that-"

I didn't have a chance to hear what was next on Paula's mind, for then the door to the conference room slammed out and Rollie Grandmaison came out, his face red, what few black hairs on top of his almost-bald head in disarray. His dark gray slacks seemed bunched around his waist, and the sleeves of his off white shirt were frayed. Whereas Rollie looked as if he had gotten dressed in the dark, the man coming out of the conference room behind him looked as if he had spent the previous day with a tailor. Black slacks and black loafers with tassels, blue-striped shirt with suspenders and a red bow tie that was definitely not a clip-on.  His black hair was thick and slicked back, and his nose prominent.  He noticed Paula and me and strolled right over, just as I heard Paula mutter, “Christ, here we go” under her breath.

"Paula?" he asked, looking down at her, the same kind of look a hungry hawk would give a plump little hare.

"Yes, Rupert?"

He stood as if he were at attention, with hands clasped behind his back "You'll note that it's one hour and ten minutes to deadline. Will you get the stories listed in this morning's budget submitted by then?"

"I will," she said, putting about a ton of disdain into each word.

"Grand," he said. "Is this gentleman here assisting you with a story on that budget list?"

"No, he's not," she said. "Rupert Holman, this is Lewis Cole. He writes for
Shoreline
magazine."

Now his look was aimed in my direction, and I aimed right back with a look of my own. He gave a quick nod. "I see. Mr. Cole, do you have any desire to write for the Chronicle?"

"Not today," I said. "My schedule is pretty full-up."

"I see," Rupert said, and then he turned his head back to Paula. "Then it would appear to me, Paula, that this is a social visit, and a social visit so close to deadline ---"

I was opening my mouth to tell him what he could do with his upcoming deadline, when Paula beat me to the punch. She reached behind herself and pulled her black leather purse free from the rear of her chair. "Actually, Rupert, Lewis is here to visit during my morning break. I haven't taken it yet."

"Mmm," he said, nodding his head again, and I imagined little gears and cams behind that impassive face. "All right, then. Ten minutes. Don't be late."

"Don't you worry," she shot back, but by then he was halfway back to his desk. Rollie looked up and gave Rupert the look of a scared steer, seeing a butcher in a bloody white apron heading his way.

Outside she slipped her arm inside mine and said something in a low voice that would probably shock about half the elected officials in Tyler.  We headed across the small common to a tiny brick

building that once held Tyler's first post office and was now the Common Grill & Grill. She pushed her way in and we sat at a booth in the back. The place was nearly empty, save for the owner, John Thiakapolous, a large bulk of a man who was sweating behind the grill, and a waitress and a couple of retirees, who were making their late-morning breakfast stretch out. It's one of the smallest restaurants on Route 1, and its name comes from the fact that the previous owner lost his bar license. When John bought the place some years ago, he had a spare neon "Grill" sign, which he used to replace the hole left when the "Bar" sign had been taken down.

Remembering what Paula had said last night, I said, "So that's the famous Rupert the Ruthless, the hired gun sent in to set the
Chronicle
in the black, and to drive out the heathen competing newspapers from your territory."

She gingerly blew across the top of her coffee cup. "Yep, and to drag this little daily newspaper kicking and screaming into the new, bold newspaper age. When I started here, the paper was part of a chain of one daily and two weeklies. Now, three owners later, we're owned by a conglomerate based in London. Can you believe that? London! And to make sure they squeeze every potential penny out of each newspaper, we get an efficiency expert like that clown to make our lives miserable for the next six months."

I took a sip from my own cup of tea. "Tell me again about the circulation wars, and what he's got planned."

"Huh," she said. "Pretty basic stuff. We've got to increase circulation and drive back the Porter and Dover papers that want to home in on our territory. To do that, we need stories, lots of stories. So we're getting pushed to do things we've never done before. Like community reporting. You know what that is? It means if there's no hard news to report, you get to make news. Stories about how to be a better parent. How to be a better student. Spring decorating lips. Mush like that.  Plus, Rupert here has hitched his start to the New Puritans to stir up things in town.”

“The new what?”

Paula made a show of rolling her eyes. "Didn't you listen to anything I said last night, or were you too busy ogling my new leather skirt?"

"I wouldn't exactly call it ogling," I replied, trying to make my voice sound hurt.

"Whatever," she said. "Look, town meeting last month, we got a couple of new selectmen. Both of them are so conservative they think Ronald Reagan and Barry Coldwater were charter founders of the ACLU. And they want to stir things up, and Rupert's glad to help them out. They've already had one victory, if you can call it that. The assistant school district superintendent. You do remember that, don't you?"

I surely did. "Yeah, he was fired after using the school computer to look at certain Web pages."

"On his lunch break," Paula pointed out. "And the pages he was looking at ... okay, they were odd, but if a guy wants to spend thirty minutes of his free time looking at pictures of women's legs in stockings and high heels, why should I care?"

"There was a deal in the works, wasn't there, to save his job?"

She nodded, took another swallow of her coffee. Back at the counter, John started muttering to himself in Greek as he flipped over a couple of eggs. Paula said, "The school board was going to give him a couple of weeks suspension without pay, but one of the school board members is married to one of our New Puritans. One meeting with Rupert and a couple of front-page stories and editorials later, the poor bastard's lost his job and has moved back in with his parents in Oregon. Let me tell you, this is turning into a hell of a business."

Then she looked at me, her eyes now bleak. "And I'm afraid it's going to get worse. Unless you can help me."

I looked back at her. “Go on."

She sighed, looked at her watch. "Jesus, only five minutes left, and you wouldn’t believe how tight this guy watches out time.  Look, Rupert’s told me that he wants me to do an in-depth profile of our own Diane Woods.  She’s one of the few women detectives in the state. Okay, a standard profile, I could practically do in my sleep. But Rupert wants more."

Oh my, I thought, and my hand trembled as I put my teacup down on the table. "I see."

"Do you?" She looked around and leaned forward, lowering her voice. "Look, I've known for a couple of years that Diane has a certain sexual preference. Big deal. Except for the usual runarounds you get from cops, she's treated me okay. But now Rupert's heard something about Diane, and his blood's up. He told me he wants something juicy, something sexy, something that will put the
Chronicle
on the map. You know what he's talking about?"

"Sure," I said, thinking back to just a few minutes ago, when I was in the newspaper's office. Instead of thinking of something sharp to say to the man, I should have just stood up and slugged him in the face. Get rid of the unnecessary steps. I went on. "Typical tabloid story. Police official with secret life. How can you trust her to prosecute certain sex offenders? How can you trust her, period? What kind of role model for the children? A few quotes from the new selectmen, maybe a minister who believes the Earth is still flat. And all wrapped up with a couple of grainy long-distance photos of Diane with her lover."

Paula now looked miserable. "Exactly. And Rupert's told me I've got just over a week to wrap it up."

"And I suppose he didn't listen to reason, did he?"

She shook her head. "Nope. I tried a couple of times, and then it just came down to recommendations. He told me that when he left in a few months, it would be his task to recommend who would stay and who would leave from the Chronicle's staff. And it would be my decisions that would put me on either one of those lists."

"A charming guy. All right, you said something about me helping you out. What do you have in mind?"

Another glance at the watch. "Not much time... Lewis, I know you’re good friends with Diane, and you know what will happen if I do a story like this.  Her career would be ruined, and every cop and firefighter in town and probably every other surrounding town would stop talking to me. Forever. I told Rupert that and he just shrugged, saying it was one of the challenges of journalism. Afflicting the comforted and comforting the afflicted, or some crap like that."