“I’ve been trying for weeks to get a vacation, but he won’t give it to me! That’s not fair. You have all the luck.”
“Yeah, too bad you couldn’t get attacked and nearly killed in Central Park too, huh, Michelle?”
She looked embarrassed. “God, I’m sorry, Jessie. I wasn’t thinking—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Michelle was twenty-five years old, going on about fifty. She seemed to be trying to cram a whole lifetime of living into a quarter of a century. Her goal was to win a Pulitzer Prize before she turned thirty. She was absolutely fearless, and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for a story. She’d parachuted from an airplane onto a private beach in the Hamptons to cover a celebrity wedding; gone undercover as a patient to do an exposé on medical malpractice; and even walked into a lion cage at the zoo to show how lax safety regulations were. I told her once that if she didn’t slow down, she’d have nothing left to accomplish by the time she was my age.
I looked around the office. It was a little after ten a.m., and the newsroom was beginning to fill up. Within a few hours, it would be a maelstrom of activity as the staff raced to put out the day’s news. There was an adrenalin in the room – an energy, a dedication – that I felt whenever I was here. It was what kept me working for the Tribune even after everything that had happened to me.
Even for a newspaper, the Tribune was a pretty eclectic place.
Take Danny, for instance. He had long, scraggly blond hair which he wore in a ponytail, was always dressed in T-shirts and jeans and pretty much looked like an exile from a heavy metal rock band. His temper tantrums are legendary. He once threw a chair though a plate-glass window. Another time he expressed his displeasure with a story by chasing a reporter down the street in front of the Tribune building and dumping a cup of coffee on his head. Much of this anger no doubt was fueled by his ambition to be the top man on the city desk. But his boss Norman Isaacs – the aged, longtime city editor of the Tribune – kept fending off retirement.
Isaacs was the exact opposite in temperament to Danny Knowlton. Plodding, cautious, and never wanting to make waves in the newsroom or the corporate hierarchy. He was known for announcing at the beginning of most workdays that he “just wanted to work a clean shift” without any problems, hassles or controversy. “No-Guts Norman” was what Danny called Isaacs behind his back because he rarely pushed hard on a story. But that careful approach had kept Isaacs as the city editor at the Tribune for more than a quarter of a century, so maybe he really did know what he was doing after all.
Occupying another corner of the newsroom was Peter Ventura. Peter was once one of the most legendary newspaper columnists in New York City – but now all the long nights spent in bars around town had caught up with him. He didn’t break too many big stories anymore, but on the other hand he didn’t seem particularly bothered by it. Right then, for instance, he was sleeping with his head on the keyboard of his computer. He slept a lot at his desk these days. No one bothered him much, although someone on the city desk had decided on a little fun a few weeks before by calling his extension while he was in the middle of one of his naps. When he sleepily picked up the phone, the person on the other end shouted: “Peter – your chair’s on fire!” They say he jumped a mile, and the entire newsroom exploded in laughter. Maybe someday the paper will get rid of him, but I doubt it. He is an institution here and the paper owes him a lot.
The managing editor was a woman named Lorraine Molinski. Blonde, fortyish, a bit overweight, she’d been at the paper for only a few years. Before that, she had been a publicist and then an advertising woman and then spent a stint on the copy desk at the New York Post. When she was promoted to managing editor here, a lot of people wondered how she got the job with so little reporting experience. There was a rumor that it might have been because she was sleeping with a member of the owner’s family. Maybe because of that, Lorraine always seemed paranoid about her job – she needed to constantly remind people that she was in charge. A lot of people don’t like Lorraine, and the nickname they’ve given her was “Lorr-Reign of Terror”. I’d never had a problem with her, though. She’d always been nice to me. And I liked the fact that there was something a bit – well – almost dangerous about her. There was also a rumor amongst my fellow reporters that she carried a gun. I remember a day when some of us were supposed to get White House security checks for a visit by the President, and Lorraine begged out. She said she didn’t think doing a background investigation on her would be good for her or the paper. I liked that. Someday I knew I had to find out more about Lorraine Molinski.
OK, I don’t have much of a life outside the Tribune.
I was an only child.
My mother was dead.
And I never even knew my father.
I was engaged once, a long time ago, but that fell through. So did the last big romance I had with a guy who lived on the West Coast. I had high hopes for that relationship for a while. But in the end there was just too much distance between us, both geographically and otherwise. So I’m alone these days.
All I have in my life is my job.
And the people around me here.
This newsroom…
Well, this newsroom is my life.
Two
Maura Walsh’s body had been found on the street in the neighborhood known as Little Italy in downtown Manhattan.
She and her partner, a veteran patrolman named Billy Renfro, had begun their tour of duty at five p.m. that evening.
They were assigned to street patrol in a squad car out of the 22nd Police Precinct, which was located on 70th Street near Third Avenue.
Police records showed that Walsh and Renfro reported making five stops that night before calling in a Code 7 – police jargon for a meal break – at 10:30. Two of the stops were at restaurants or bars where disturbances had occurred; one at an apartment house; another at a bodega; and a fifth with someone listed as an “informant” on East 86th Street between Second and Third Avenue.
The explanation given for each stop was a simple “pursuit of citizen complaint”. Of course, lots of cops called in or filled out paperwork with vague entries like that because they didn’t have time to deal with all the bureaucratic details that were a part of the job. Most of the time it didn’t matter. Unless something went wrong, like it had for Maura Walsh.
Her partner, Billy Renfro, said he’d left her in the squad car while he went into a pizza place to pick up an order for them. When he returned to the car, she was gone. He later discovered her body lying in an alley not far away. She had been shot two times in the chest with her own gun. The gun was missing.
By the time the paramedics arrived at the scene, Maura Walsh was already dead. It took her a long time to die though, the Medical Examiner’s office later reported. The gunshot wounds had immobilized her and left her too weak to even call out for help, but she was still alive for at least fifteen minutes and maybe for as long as a full hour.
If she could have reached her police radio, maybe she could have signaled someone she was in trouble. But the radio wasn’t on her body when she was found. It was discovered later in a trashcan down the street, dumped there by whoever killed her.