“Then you lost me again,” he says.
“Get some rest, sport.”
As I hop off the Rio Rio, the white heron squawks and flies from the dock. I hear Burns call after me: “Wait, man, I gotta ask you somethin’.”
I turn around to see him leaning forward intently, knuckles planted on the gunwale. Lowering his voice, he says, “I was just wonderin’, Billy Preston—you ever heard a him?”
“Sure. Played with the Beatles.”
“One a my all-time heroes, man. Did he, you know… make it past forty?”
“Yeah, Billy’s still alive and kicking.”
“Far out. How ’bout Greg Allman?”
“Hangin’ tough,” I say, “and he’s gotta be pushing fifty-five.”
Jay Burns looks vastly relieved. “Thanks,” he tells me. “I don’t keep up with the news all that much.”
13
The next morning I get up early and head for the newsroom, where I will gently steal a story from Evan, our intern.
I heard on the radio that the former mayor of Beckerville has passed away “after a long illness.” The former mayor of Beckerville happened to be a petty slimeball named Dean Ryall Cheatworth, who was caught accepting sexual favors in exchange for corrupt activities; to wit, initiating zoning variances to accommodate certain adult-oriented establishments. As mayor of Beckerville, Dean Cheatworth once sold his tie-breaking vote for a two-minute hand job, which ultimately resulted in the grand opening of a nude hot-oil massage parlor next door to a children’s day care center. The former mayor of Beckerville would have spent much longer than three weeks in prison had he not been diagnosed with terminal cancer and released on a sympathy parole.
I’m determined that Dean Cheatworth’s obituary shall not minimize or overlook his misdeeds, as happens too often at the Union-Register. Emma thinks it’s callous to provide a full and frank accounting of a dead scoundrel’s life. She says it’s disrespectful to the grieving kin. I suspect if Emma had been running the show, Richard Nixon’s obit would have dealt with Watergate parenthetically, if at all.
Evan doesn’t seem upset that I’m poaching the story. “All right, Jack,” he says amiably, “but you owe me one.” Evan is gangly and cyanotic and fashionably disheveled. He has no intention of becoming a professional journalist after finishing college, but nonetheless I’m fond of him.
“Mr. Cheatworth is one of those thieving schmucks who deserves to be drop-kicked into his grave,” I feel bound to explain. “Better for me to do it than you. Emma’s likely to make a stink.”
Evan nods, saying, “Man, you and Emma!”
Over beers he once predicted she and I would become lovers, based on the “smoldering” intensity of our newsroom arguments. It was such a ludicrous comment that I couldn’t bring myself to insult the kid.
Today is different. “Wipe that frat-boy smirk off your face,” I snap at him, “unless you want to spend the rest of the summer writing for the Wedding page.”
Evan mumbles a bemused apology and slips away. Logging on to the morgue, I retrieve and print out the most comprehensive, unsparing stories about the onetime political kingpin of Beckerville.
After making a few quick phone calls, I begin to write:
Dean R. Cheatworth, the longtime Beckerville mayor driven from office by a sex-and-corruption scandal, passed away Thursday after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 61.
“I don’t care what they say, he was good for this town,” said Millicent Buchholz, Cheatworth’s executive secretary for most of his 14 years at city hall. “Dean made some dumb-ass moves and he paid for them. But we shouldn’t forget the decent, honest things he did along the way.”
Cheatworth, who served as mayor from 1984 to 1998, is credited with bringing the first food court to the Beckerville Outlet Mall and expanding the town’s bicycle-path system by almost three miles.
But two years ago, Cheatworth was convicted of trading his vote on the zoning board for private sessions with prostitutes employed by Miami massage-parlor mogul Victor Rubella. Rubella and three women pleaded guilty in the case, and all testified against Cheatworth at trial.
The jury took only nineteen minutes to convict the mayor, who was suspended from office and slapped with a six-year sentence. He was released early when prison doctors discovered a malignant tumor in his right lung.