I hailed a cab, which slowed to a crawl once we hit midtown. I got out at Fifty-first and Lexington, threw the driver a good tip and sprinted the few blocks over to
Rockefeller Center. I was nearly disemboweled pushing through the security turnstile when my ID failed to work, and got off on the eleventh floor out of breath and with possible internal bleeding.
I entered the newsroom, and as I walked through the sea of desks my heart dropped when I saw Tony Valentine approaching.
“Henry,” he said, huffing as he jogged over. “Do you have a minute?”
“Actually, I don’t. Not right now,” I said.
“Come on, Parker, you’ve been avoiding me since I got here. At some point you’ll need to open that hard heart of yours for a get-to-know-you session.”
“Listen, Tony, I appreciate that, and at some point we will. But right now I have a situation to deal with.”
“A situation? That sounds juicy. Do tell.”
“Like I said, Tony, not right now.”
“Do you have a problem with me?” Tony asked, his eyes narrowing, offset by a strangely playful smile.
“I’m just trying to be a good sport. Fit in with my new colleagues.”
“Listen, Tony, I’d be lying if I didn’t think our two types of…reporting didn’t really overlap. But today there actually is something going on. No joke.”
He looked me over, trying to determine if I was telling the truth or lying just to get out of a conversation. I certainly wasn’t above doing that, at least not with Tony.
That I didn’t have much respect for the profession of gossip columnist was no secret to anyone who’d ever had a conversation with me about the job. I ranked its importance on the Journalism Scale of Importance somewhere between the people who filled up tubes of Wite-Out and telemarketers.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll take a rain check for today. But at some point I’m going to cash in all my checks and you’re going to have lunch with me.”
I offered a noncommittal nod/shake, and Tony walked away. In the meantime, I had one person who might actually skin me alive if I didn’t answer to him soon.
I arrived at Jack’s desk only to find it vacant. It didn’t take me long to figure out where he’d gone.
The shouting coming from Wallace Langston’s office could be heard throughout the entire newsroom, and reporters who tended to make more noise than the average airbus on takeoff sat dead silent listening to the barrage.
Wallace tended to be a fairly mellow guy. In fact, in my few years at the Gazette, I’d rarely heard him chew a reporter out, rarely saw him get pissed at the copy desk
(if he had, Evelyn Waterstone might have impaled him on one of the flagpoles outside). What really burned Wallace was losing a story to the competition. And since Jack was the newsroom’s elder statesman, he surely took the brunt of it. And since I was partnering with Jack, he no doubt wanted me there to take some of the small-arms fire.
I walked past Wallace’s secretary. She was usually kind to me, always with a good word, but today she looked at me like I was marching right into the sights of a firing squad. I could have sworn she gave me one of those “please, don’t go in there” looks usually reserved for the girlfriend in horror movies who pleads with her man not to go into the basement where the killer is waiting with a machete the size of a guitar.
Sadly, I could not heed her advice, and knocked on
Wallace’s door.
“Who is it?” he yelled from inside.
“It’s Henry,” I said.
“Get the hell in here.”
I gripped the doorknob, took a breath, and hoped
Wallace’s machete was dull.
I opened the door to see Jack seated in front of
Wallace’s desk. Wallace was not seated behind it, as per usual. Instead he was pacing around the room while
Jack’s head swiveled trying to keep pace.
Wallace looked like he’d come in to work properly dressed, hair combed, clothes ironed. But now his graying hair was askew, glasses crooked on his nose. And the pads on his elbows looked like they were being worn away.
“Where the hell have you been?” Wallace said.
“Meeting with a cop about the Kaiser investigation,”
I said. “He’s going to find out what he can about the guy who might be responsible.”
“That’s dandy,” Wallace said. “While you were out pussyfooting with your boys in blue, did you happen to see this?”
He walked over to his desk and picked up a copy of that morning’s New York Dispatch. Wallace stomped over to me, holding the paper much as you would a bag of dog poop. I looked at Jack, wanted to see if he had anything to say, but the old man sat there, head down.
Wallace handed me the paper. “Read it,” he said.
I looked at the front page. Immediately my stomach lurched up to my throat, frustration and anger welling up inside me.
I turned to where the front page article continued, and read the whole thing. Slowly. Word by word. Then I closed the paper and threw it across the room, cursing loud enough that Wallace’s secretary would probably have to apologize to whoever she was on the phone with.
“How the hell did she…” I said.
“Don’t you dare ask that question,” Wallace said. “It’s your job to know what goes on in this city. You handle the crime beat. It is your duty to know every nook and cranny of this island, from the mayor’s office to the bums who live beneath the subway. For something like this to get past you…you must have been asleep at the wheel.”
He looked at Jack, waited for a response. “Either that or the two of you have become so narrow-minded with this
Kaiser murder and Gaines follow-up that you can’t sniff what’s under your nose.”
“I didn’t know anything about this,” I said. “Paulina…I don’t know where she got it. And I don’t know which cops she spoke to, but if you look at the article they all spoke on condition of anonymity. I just met with my man in the NYPD, and he’s as clued in as anyone. He didn’t mention a word of this, and he doesn’t keep things from me. Not like this. Something about this piece doesn’t pass the smell test, Wallace.”
Wallace picked the newspaper back up. He held the cover out for us both to see.
On the front page of the Dispatch was an enlarged picture of what looked like a small stone, possibly a piece of gravel, pitch-black in color with a rough texture.
The headline next to the photo read The Darkness.
The subtitle said, The Drug That’s About to Take Man- hattan Back to the Stone Age.