Sweet Dreams, Irene (2 page)

T
HE
W
RIGLEY
B
UILDING,
which houses the
Express,
is in downtown Las Piernas. It’s been there since the 1920s, when the father of the current editor had already turned his own father’s small rag into a good-sized paper. We are always in the shadow of the
L.A. Times,
but the local beach communities have appreciated our special attention to their concerns over the years, so we’re firmly entrenched along the coastline south of Los Angeles.

As I entered the building, I was greeted by Geoff, the security man, who was rumored to have been working in the building since opening day.

“Good morning, Miss Kelly,” he said. “There’s someone here who says he has an appointment with you.” I didn’t bother to return Geoff’s questioning look; he knew it was not my custom to meet people off their own turf, nor at 7:30 in the morning. I turned around and saw additional reason for Geoff’s skepticism: the person waiting for me looked to be all of sixteen. He was decked out in black from head to toe, and I doubted his hair was originally that coal black color. But the face was familiar, so I hesitated for a moment. It was a face full of that intense seriousness of purpose that seems built into adolescence.

He nervously stood up, wiping his palm on the leg of his pants before extending his hand to me. “Miss Kelly? I’m Jacob Henderson.”

Henderson. So that was why he looked familiar. Son of Brian Henderson, candidate for District Attorney. I faltered only a moment before I took the offered hand in mine and said, “Hello, Jacob. I’m so glad you’re on time.”

I turned back to Geoff, feeling bad about making him doubt his instincts, but saying, “Jacob and I are going to have a chat downstairs. I think we’ll have more privacy there.”

Geoff smiled. “Yes, Miss Kelly, I understand. Anybody asks, I’ll tell them you were in but had to leave for an interview.”

“Thanks.” I turned to Jacob. “Would you like to see the presses?”

The seriousness gave way to curiosity, and he nodded. He followed me through the maze which is the downstairs basement of the
Express.
“They aren’t running right now,” I said, “but you’ll get to see them, anyway. They may run a special section while we’re down here.”

“How do you know they aren’t running?”

“There’s a low rumble that runs through the whole building when they do. It’s quiet now.”

We entered the area of the basement which houses the presses. As Jacob looked around in wonder, I took a deep breath and smiled. Ink and newsprint is my favorite fragrance in all the world. I loved being down there.

Coburn, one of the operators, saw us and walked over. “How are you, Danny?” I greeted him.

“I’m great, Irene. Suzanne and I have got a new grandbaby.” He pulled out an ink-stained wallet and showed me a photo. I made appreciative noises and he beamed with pride. He put the wallet back and smiled over at Jacob. “Who you got with you?”

“This is Jacob,” I said, and they shook hands, Jacob not even flinching at the dark smudges he received. Why not, I thought. Matches the rest of his outfit. “Jacob and I need a place to talk. Can you help us out?”

“Sure, sure. I think I can manage something.” We followed him around and through the warren of machinery. We went past a cubicle with vending machines in it, and I stopped and fished some change out of my purse.

“Want a cup of coffee or a soda?” I asked Jacob.

“A Coke would be nice, thank you.”

“This early in the morning?” Coburn said.

“Why not?” I said. “In fact, I think I’ll have one too. You want anything, Danny?”

Still disbelieving, he shook his head. While I took a chance on the vending machine, Danny talked to Jacob about the presses. I watched them for a while. Jacob was clearly fascinated, and Danny enjoyed the audience. I wondered what was on the kid’s mind.

I had been covering the election since the summer, when both the mayor’s and D.A.’s races had become fairly wide open. Brian Henderson, Jacob’s father, was one of the two leading candidates for D.A. As politicians go, he was an okay sort. I knew he had made some compromises along the way in order to hold a fragile coalition of supporters together, but he still seemed able to take a stand on an issue.

I was not as impressed with his chief opponent, Brad “Monty” Montgomery. Monty struck me as the type who would do just about anything to win an election. I stopped looking for sincerity in politicians long ago, but something in my gut made me especially leery of him.

Unfortunately, the readers of the
Express
needed more than Irene Kelly’s gut feelings. They were being fed all sorts of contradictory information through the mail and in ads. The campaign had started out on the up and up, but with only one week to go, the mud was really flying.

Danny saw me standing there with the Cokes, and brought Jacob back over to me. “We’re going to be running a special a little later on, Irene. Will you and the lad still be here?”

“Not sure, Danny, but you know I love to watch them run.”

Coburn laughed. “That you do, that you do.” He led us to a small storage room, pulling a couple of folding chairs out of a small office. “It’s not as grand as the conference room of Wrigley’s office, but it’s a damned sight more private.”

“You’re great, Danny—thanks.”

He smiled and left. Jacob and I settled on to the metal chairs and opened our Cokes. The nervousness was back, and he fidgeted with the pop-top on the soda can.

“Okay, Jacob, I’ve interrupted my day and gone AWOL first thing this morning so you could talk to me. I have a feeling you’re supposed to be in school somewhere right now. Want to tell me why you’ve come to see me?”

“I called in sick. They won’t miss me.”

I waited.

“You’re the reporter that writes all the stuff about my dad, right?”

“Guilty.”

“Well, I need your help.”

“In what way? I have to try to write objectively, Jacob, no matter who the candidate is.”

“It’s not that.” He looked up at me, deadly earnest. “I need for you to prevent a witch hunt.”

A
WITCH HUNT?
Jacob, if this is some kind of Halloween prank, I swear I’ll—”

“It’s not! It’s not a prank!” he protested hotly. “And it has to do with real witches.”

Great, I thought. I’m sitting in a walk-in closet with the maniac son of one of the people I’m supposed to be covering. I took a deep breath and said, “Real witches?”

He calmed down. “Well, no. Just people who
think
they are witches.”

“Why don’t you try this from the beginning?”

“Monty Montgomery is about to put out a piece of campaign literature that says I’m involved in a satanic cult. He’s going to talk about it like there’s a bunch of murdering Satanists running around loose in Las Piernas, and that he’s going to put a stop to it. He’s going to say my dad can’t be expected to stop them because I’m one of them.”

“Are you a murdering Satanist?”

“No.”

“Then it’s libel.”

“You know how this works. It will take months or maybe years if my dad sues for libel. The damage will already be done. My dad will spend the next five days trying to deny I’m a member of the cult instead of campaigning on the issues, and Montgomery will win.”

“You seem to know a lot about campaigns.”

He looked at me like I was from Mars. “Well, why wouldn’t I? I’ve grown up with them.”

Since Henderson had only run once before, unsuccessfully against a then-popular incumbent, I didn’t see how twice in four years meant Jacob grew up with campaigning. But I supposed from the perspective of someone his age, it must have seemed constant, given the time his father would have devoted to it.

“If you’ve grown up with campaigns, you know your dad will know how to combat mudslinging. What is it that really bothers you about this?”

He was silent, seeming to be debating about what he should and shouldn’t tell me.

“Off the record?” he said.

A sixteen-year-old demanding to be off the record. He did know something about politics. “That depends. You came to see a reporter, after all.”

“But it’s about something that isn’t true. It’s not news, then, is it?”

And he had grown up with a lawyer. “Okay,” I said. “But if I find out otherwise, expect to see it in print.”

He mulled this over. “Okay. Montgomery has this photo. It’s supposed to show me participating in a witches’ coven.”

“A witches’ coven?”

“Yeah, you know, a group of witches.”

“I know what a coven is—but how did he get a photograph of you and a coven?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I do know, but I don’t know how.” He drew a breath. “What I mean is, I was there, but I wasn’t there as a witch or anything. And I didn’t see anyone with a camera, so I don’t know how.”

“Why were you there?”

“You’re not going to believe me.”

I waited.

He sighed. “I was trying to get a friend of mine to leave. She’s mixed up with the wrong crowd. I was trying to get her to come home.”

“Girlfriend?”

“She’s just a friend. Not my girlfriend.” He looked down at his hands. “We grew up together. I’ve known her since we were little kids. Sammy’s been our neighbor for years.”

“Sammy?”

“Gethsemane—yeah, I know. It’s worse than Sammy. Her parents are real religious types. I think that’s part of why she’s doing this crap with the witches. I don’t think she really believes in it. I think she’s just trying to rebel against her parents or something. Anyway, we’ve always talked, and been…I don’t know, we could always just talk to one another. She’s my friend. Understand?”

“I understand. Do her folks know about the witchcraft stuff?”

“Yeah. They kicked her out. They’re so busy going to church all the time, I don’t think they care about anything else.”

“So where is she living?”

“She was just spending the night with her witch friends, but I talked her into going down to Casa de Esperanza, the runaway shelter. You know about that?”

“Yes.” Casa de Esperanza was, in fact, one of the many gifts Frank’s neighbor, Mrs. Fremont, had given to Las Piernas. She had started it back in the 1970s, when I was in college. One semester I did volunteer work there for credit in a psychology class. She had founded the shelter, but she had since handed most of the administration of the facility to other people. She had kept some of it in the family; I remembered that she once told me her own grandson worked there. All the same, Mrs. Fremont still spent a lot of her time at the shelter, lending an ear to troubled teens. She seemed to be the town grandmother.

“Well, anyway,” Jacob went on, “I talked Sammy into going to the shelter. She didn’t put up much of an argument. I guess even the witch friends were tired of having her over all the time.”

“Who are these witches?”

“They’re not even really witches. It’s just a bunch of high school kids playing dress-up. They read all these weird books and try to do the rituals and all of that, but as far as I know the worst thing they’ve done is gone into the cemetery after closing.”

“Some people think there are occult groups murdering their pets, having strange sexual rituals, worshipping the devil,” I said. “Maybe getting into drugs, things like that. Trying to be evil, you might say.”

“I know what people think. But it isn’t true. Not with this group. I mean, I think Sammy would let me know if they did anything like that. She loves animals—she wouldn’t hang out with anyone that killed a pet. Maybe there’s some other group of witches out there. I don’t know. These people she hangs out with talk like they’re really evil, but I think they just like the showy stuff. I think they’re all talk.”

“All of them? Maybe Sammy’s fairly innocent, but when people get into this kind of thing, they sometimes attract people who are more serious about it all.”

He brooded over that for a moment. “That’s what I’m afraid of, I guess. That’s why I keep trying to get her to quit hanging around with them.”

He was holding something back, so I decided to wait it out. It was getting stuffy in the little room, but I figured there was more to the story than he had told me thus far.

“There is one guy …” he said, then paused, seeming reluctant to say more. “He’s older. Sammy told me about him. He’s sort of the leader. They never see his face. He wears some sort of goat mask or something. He wasn’t there the night I tried to get Sammy to leave. But she was really freaked out, you know, like if the guy found me there he would kill me.”

“Kill
you?”

“I don’t know, maybe she was just being dramatic. She is sometimes. Lots of times, really. She just needs attention. But I think she really was scared of something.”

Something was bothering me about his story, and I finally figured out what it was. “If you didn’t see a photographer, how do you know there’s a photo? And how do you know about this hit piece of Montgomery’s?”

He turned beet red. If he was nervous before, he was frantic now. “I can’t tell you that.”

“You’re really testing my patience, you know that? There’s going to be a witch hunt, only there aren’t really any witches. You say you’ve been photographed at a gathering of these wanna-be witches, but you don’t know who took the photograph. You say there’s about to be a smear campaign that might cause your father to lose an election, but you can’t tell me how you know. And for toppers, you’ve asked me to keep all of this stuff that
maybe
happened and
maybe
will happen off the record. What the hell am I supposed to do with all this?”

“Please,” he said, bursting into tears, “I need your help.”

I felt like a bully. I hadn’t meant to make the kid cry. I leaned over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Jacob, I didn’t mean to be so hard on you.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a packet of tissues.

He was embarrassed, but he took one.

“Have you talked to your father about this?”

He laughed. There was no mirth in it. “What father?” he said.

“The one you care so much about that you’d come down here and talk to the meanest reporter in town.”

He smiled a little at that. “You’re not mean. He’s not around much. He’s—I understand, really—it’s important to him to win. But he doesn’t have time to sleep, let alone talk to me. He’s really worn out.”

“He should be proud of you. You care about your friends and your family. You strike me as being a good-hearted person.”

“He doesn’t think so. He doesn’t want people to know about me. I don’t know. It’s because of the way I dress—at least, that’s what my mom says. I guess I’m no different from Sammy. I sort of rebel against him. But I really do like to wear black.”

“Can’t help you with that, Jacob. You’re in one of the world’s oldest struggles there. What do you think I
can
help you with?”

“Could you tell people I’m not a witch?”

“It will seem pretty odd if I do that before anyone has said you are.”

“It’s going to happen. I—can you keep a secret?”

“Most secrets. If they won’t hurt anyone, or compromise the paper. But just because I’m a reporter doesn’t mean you can’t trust me with a confidence.”

“I have a friend who—who works for the Montgomery campaign. We don’t usually talk about politics. But when my friend saw this flyer about me being a witch—well, that’s how I found out. I don’t want to get my friend in trouble.”

“Girlfriend?”

He turned red again. “Please don’t ask me any more about it, okay? I’ve told you too much already.”

He acted as if he was going to leave. “Hold on, hold on,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone about your friend.” He looked at me as if he were trying to decide if he could trust me. Apparently I passed the test, because he sat back down again.

“Look, Jacob, all I can do is try to find out if this piece is really going to be mailed out, and if it is, I’ll do what I can to balance the coverage so that your side of the story gets told. It would help if I could get some kind of quote from your friend Sammy. Do you think she would talk to me?”

“If I went with you, she might.”

“Is she playing hooky today, too?”

“Naw, she’s in school. They try to make sure kids go to school if they stay at the shelter. It’s a rule.”

“What time will she be out of school?”

“Two-thirty.”

“Okay, so, would she be back at the shelter by three?”

“I could go back to school—you know, tell them I’m feeling better. I’ll find her and ask her to meet us there if you want.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you there at three.” I pulled out a card and gave it to him. “Call me here at the paper if you need to cancel.”

He took it and read it over. “Okay,” he said.

“Do you have any idea of how Montgomery’s people knew you’d be out at this witch shindig?”

“No.”

“Any chance your friend at the Montgomery campaign might have told them?”

“No!”

“Okay, okay, take it easy. Did you tell anyone else? Or could anyone have overheard you talking about it?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. But I did have a big argument at the shelter with Sammy. Maybe someone heard us. I don’t know. The walls are kind of thin, and there are always a lot of kids hanging out there.”

“One other thing. How are you at taking advice from old fogeys?”

“Depends on the advice, I guess, and the old fogey.”

“Well, let’s say this old fogey.”

“Try me. You’re not
real
old.”

“Thanks, I guess. I really don’t have any business sticking my nose in, so it’s just between the two of us, okay?”

“Okay.”

“It’s just something to think about. The way I figure it, if you’re concerned enough about your dad’s campaign to come here and talk to me, maybe you’re concerned enough to fight a little of the fire Montgomery plans on setting.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’ll be using your appearance—the black clothes and black hair—to promote his ideas in people’s minds. Trust me on this—I used to work in public relations. In fact, a pal of mine named Kevin Malloy could make you an expert in this kind of stuff. People will try to place you in a box—the box you seem most likely to fit in. Those that get to know you, even for as short a time as I have, will doubt you could ever fit in a box labeled ‘witch.’ But those that don’t know you are only going to have what Montgomery says and any pictures of you they see in the paper. And believe me, there will be a picture in the paper if this comes out.”

He groaned.

“Anyway, you have every right to wear whatever clothes you want to wear, or to dye your hair pink, if you want to. But there’s a price for everything. Ask yourself if it’s worth it to change your image for a few days.”

“That sounds a lot like selling out.”

“Maybe. But again, ask yourself what set of principles you’re selling out to. The set that doesn’t want to bring harm to others, or the one that says you’re free to make any fashion statement you choose. It’s up to you. No skin off my nose.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“What do you say we get some fresh air?”

“Yeah, I’m suffocating in here.”

As we stood up, we heard the throbbing sound of the presses as they started up. Danny met us outside the door with ear protectors. “Better wear these,” he shouted, as the roaring grew. He led us back through the aisles. Jacob was enthralled with it all. I had seen it a thousand times or more, and I was still enthralled.

He shook Danny’s hand as we left, and we handed over the earmuffs. Jacob was smiling, and I was glad to see him lighten up a little. “Feel better?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m still scared about it, but I guess I feel like maybe there’s something I can do about it.”

“I’ll see you at three.”

“Okay.” He turned to leave. I had started up the stairs when I heard him call out to me.

“Miss Kelly?”

I turned around.

“What kind of classes should I take if I want to work here?”

“Journalism and English are good starting points. You have a school paper at Las Piernas High. Try to get on it.”

“I think I will. Bye.”

He moved out of the building with a little more energy than he had shown in the halls, and I found myself bounding up the stairs. I don’t often encounter young people—my God, I was old enough to call them young people—in my work, and there was something refreshing about spending time with Jacob. As I entered the newsroom, my mood was shot down by a booming voice filled to the brim with sarcasm.