“Oh, excuse me, Fitz.” Dottie was laughing. “You think this is new? What about yellow journalism? The 1890s, William Randolph Hearst and Pulitzer competing for newspaper circulation in New York? Look at the lies they published.”
She had him there. The two publishers lowered their papers’ prices to a penny, to reach as many people as possible, and then slapped outlandish—and completely false—stories on yellow newsprint to draw attention. Historians still believed that phony dispatches from Hearst’s journalists in Cuba started the Spanish-American War.
Fitz parried: “It’s just so much easier to spread lies when you can reach, well, forty or fifty million people by pushing a button.”
She said, “It’s not the medium. Men still shave but they don’t use straight razors. We still listen to music but not on eight-track tapes.”
“How do you know about eight-tracks?”
“I walked down to the public library and looked it up in the Encyclopædia Britannica.”
He snorted a laugh, coughed a bit.
“You okay?”
“Pollen.” Another sip of whiskey got downed. After a moment he said, “I miss the . . . relationship.”
“Relationship?”
“A newspaper—a paper newspaper—is like a friend knocking on your door and sitting down with you at the breakfast table or desk. It’s a traveling companion when you’re on the train or plane. It’s a thing you can touch, you can hold, you can smell. It’s big, it’s real. That’s what I miss. Okay, enough crap. ’Night.”
He started back to his office.
“Wait.”
Fitz turned.
“What’s the mistake?” Dottie said. “The punctuation?”
“Oh. Using an apostrophe s for the plural; it’s always for the possessive. Never for plural. Irks me to see sentences like ‘There were three Frank’s at the party,’ Frank apostrophe s.”
“You’re wrong.”
He cocked his head. “What?”
“You can use apostrophe s for the plural.”
“No, you can’t,” he grumbled. Now that the apology was a matter of record, he could be curmudgeonly.
She said, “Dot the i’s. Without the apostrophe the word becomes is and the reader’s confused. Do’s, the same thing. Do’s and Don’ts.”
“Goddamn.”
“This make me a young whippersnapper?”
“I’m going home.”
“Fitz, you can’t drive,” Dottie said. “I’ll get you an Uber.”
“The hell’s an Uber?”
He tried, but he just couldn’t keep a straight face.
14
Once home, Fitz walked into his den, which he’d turned into an office. The ten-by-ten-square-foot room was more congested than his space at the Examiner.
He cleared the top of his desk—no easy task—then dropped into the creaky chair and happened to glance up at his wall, covered with clippings of articles he’d written over the years, encased in cheap plastic frames.
City Councilman Indicted in Money Laundering Scheme
Organized Crime Figure Linked to High-Tech Entrepreneur
Sex Trafficking Ring Brought Down
There were many more. He’d been an investigative journalist for more than forty years.
He smiled to himself at that thought: his journalism professor—the J-School at University of Missouri—had given him a failing mark for writing, “He had been a professor for over ten years.”
“Mr. Fitzhugh. It should be ‘more than.’ When you have individual items, the adverbial phrase is ‘more than’; when you have a single quantity, ‘over’ is proper. ‘He did well over the course of his tenure as professor.’ Though I would recast the sentence to say, ‘During his tenure as professor, he did well.’”
Ah, the battles we writers fight . . . All in the name of helping our readers best understand what we’re saying to them.
Now, let’s look at what makes you tick, Mr. Gravedigger. What is your why?
He opened Jen’s bag and extracted his notes, spread them out on the desk before him. To a bulletin board next to his desk he pinned the chart he’d created earlier, when he was exploring his publicity theory.
Stories around the Time and Place of the Gravedigger’s Kidnappings
Kidnapping One—Shana Evans
● Domestic batteries and one parental domestic abduction.
● Gang shootout, bystander killed in cross fire.
● Food processing plant investigation—salmonella outbreak.
● Four robberies, all drug related.
● Graffiti on synagogue; LGBTQ activist assaulted; hate crimes.
● Serial killer preying on prostitutes (MO was different from the Gravedigger’s).
● Assault and battery at rally outside the national political debates.
● West Virginia businesswoman killed in a mugging outside restaurant.
Kidnapping Two—Jasper Coyle
● Interview with governor.
● Coal-company manager’s death—defective guardrails on Route 29.
● Downtown renovation project.
● Local meth cooker rivalry.
● Domestic homicide.
● Miscellaneous minor police blotter stories.
● Parental kidnapping in a custody battle.
Fitz glanced at the whiskey bottle sitting on a table nearby, beside a relatively clean glass. But he wanted no more. He needed to think straight and there was still much research to be done.
But then: What the hell? He dug through two drawers until he found a pack of Marlboros. He tapped one out, lit it and gazed at the chart, then flipped through his notes. He smoked half the cigarette down, amused that he didn’t cough once.
What’s your motive? What’s your why?
He thought of the British woman who’d solved the Jasper Coyle kidnapping limerick.
The trick is to keep an open mind. Don’t start solving the puzzle right away. Let it sit . . .
Which is exactly what he did.
Scanning the chart. Publicity as a motive?
That made no sense.
Another drag . . .
Or did it?
“Oh my God,” he whispered. Then barked a sharp laugh. He believed he had the answer. It would take some work to verify, but that was a reporter’s job, after all. He booted up his computer.
Pounding the digital pavement.
A nice turn of phrase. He’d share it with Dottie.
An hour passed, two hours. Hunched over the computer keyboard, index digits hard at work. Fitz thought of Dottie’s fingers, tipped in ebony nails, flying over the keys. He wished he’d learned to touch-type.
Around two a.m., he paused, as he felt cool air stirring at his feet. Had a door blown open?
No, he’d locked them all, he was sure.
He typed a few more keystrokes, hit return, then logged off and rose, turning.
Standing in the doorway to his office were two men. One was Peter Tile, from the bar that afternoon. The other he didn’t recognize: a big, swarthy man with a belligerent face. Both were wearing blue latex gloves. Tile held a large plastic gas can. The other man, a pistol, with a silencer.
Fitz sighed. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and took it from his lips, stubbing it out in a crystal ashtray with a chip in the side. A present from Jen years and years and years ago.