‘The headline’s a little lacking,’ Morrison began, ‘but — ‘
‘ — that’s what Libby’s for,’ Dees finished for him. ‘So . . . ‘
‘So?’ Morrison asked. His eyes were wide and blue and guileless behind his gold-rimmed glasses. He put his hand back down on top of the folder, smiled at Dees, and waited.
‘So what do you want me to say? That I was wrong?’
Morrison’s smile widened a millimeter or two. ‘Just that you might have been wrong. That’d do, I guess — you know what a pussycat I am.’
‘Yeah, tell me about it,’ Dees said, but he was relieved. He could take a little abasement; it was the actual crawling around on his belly that he didn’t like.
Morrison sat looking at him, right hand splayed over the file.
‘Okay; I might have been wrong.’
‘How large-hearted of you to admit it,’ Morrison said, and handed the file over.
Dees snatched it greedily, took it over to the chair by the window, and opened it. What he read this time — it was no more than a loose assemblage of wire-service stories and clippings from a few small-town weeklies — blew his mind.
I didn’t see this before, he thought, and on the heels of that: Why didn’t I see this before?
He didn’t know . . . but he did know he might have to rethink that idea of being top hog in the tabloid sty if he missed any more stories like this. He knew something else, as well: if his and Morrison’s positions had been reversed (and Dees had turned down the editor’s chair at Inside View not once but twice over the last seven years), he would have made Morrison crawl on his belly like a reptile before giving him the file.
Fuck that, he told himself. You would have fired his ass right out the door.
The idea that he might be burning out fluttered through his mind. The burnout rate was pretty high in this business, he knew. Apparently you could spend only so many years writing about flying saucers carrying off whole Brazilian villages (usually illustrated by out-of-focus
photographs of light-bulbs hanging from strands of thread), dogs that could do calculus, and out-of-work daddies chopping their kids up like kindling wood. Then one day you suddenly snapped.
Like Dottie Walsh, who had gone home one night and taken a bath with a dry-cleaning bag wrapped around her head.
Don’t be a fool, he told himself, but he was uneasy just the same. The story was sitting there, right there, big as life and twice as ugly. How in the hell could he have missed it?
He looked up at Morrison, who was rocked back in his desk chair with his hands laced together over his stomach, watching him. ‘Well?’ Morrison asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘This could be big. And that’s not all. I think it’s the real goods.’
‘I don’t care if it’s the real goods or not,’ Morrison said, ‘as long as it sells papers. And it’s going to sell lots of papers, isn’t it, Richard?’
‘Yes.’ He got to his feet and tucked the folder under his arm. ‘I want to run this guy’s backtrail, starting with the first one we know about, up in Maine.’
‘Richard?’
He turned back at the door and saw Morrison was looking at the contact sheets again. He was smiling.
‘What do you think if we run the best of these next to a photo of Danny DeVito in that Batman movie?’
‘It works for me,’ Dees said, and went out. Questions and self-doubts were suddenly, blessedly set aside; the old smell of blood was back in his nose, strong and bitterly compelling, and for the time being he only wanted to follow it all the way to the end. The end came a week later, not in Maine, not in Maryland, but much farther south, in North Carolina.
2
It was summertime, which meant the living should have been easy and the cotton high, but nothing was coming easy for Richard Dees as that long day wound its way down toward dark.
The major problem was his inability — at least so far — to get into the small Wilmington airport, which served only one major carrier, a few commuter airlines, and a lot of private planes.