Читать книгу Gemini Rising - Brian McNaughton - Страница 5

CHAPTER TWO

If you didn’t mind disorder, the city room of the Riveredge Banner normally looked like a good place to take a nap. On a typical workday, a few reporters lounged around the untidy office, but they seldom found the energy to attack their typewriters unless Jack Higgins, the managing editor, was present to goad them.

On Wednesday nights, that changed. The paper went to bed on Thursday mornings. Late-breaking stories were covered energetically for the pages that hadn’t been locked up in order to give the weekly a look of up-to-the-minute timeliness.

And whenever she had to work on that night, Marcia Creighton found it easy to pretend that she was working for a real newspaper, one that thrived on life-or-death deadline pressures.

It was Wednesday night, but it was still early for the kind of pandemonium that often developed. The real activity wouldn’t start until eleven, when the staff would begin drifting in from scattered meetings of municipal governments. By that time, Marcia hoped, she would have completed her story about the township Planning Board and be on her way home.

She might not make it, though. Her efforts to finish her story had been interrupted five or six times by telephone calls: obituaries she had to transcribe, circulation problems she couldn’t solve, belated ads she couldn’t take. Her conscience wouldn’t permit her to ignore a ringing telephone; and Ron Green, the only other person in the city room, was busy with his own calls.

Ron was another one who liked to pretend that he was a real newspaperman; although with Ron, it was less a game to make work more interesting than it was an obsessive delusion. He habitually talked and acted like something out of an amateur production of Front Page. She had never actually heard him say “Stop the presses!” but she believed he could have said it with a straight face.

She knew it was unkind to laugh at Ron Green. She could take her job lightly, as a kind of footnote to her existence as a suburban housewife, but Ron’s job was his whole life. Now in his mid-thirties, he had worked on a dozen progressively less prestigious newspapers across the country. He had nothing to go home to but a furnished room, a six-pack, and a police radio.

He was always talking about “getting a break” or “making the right connections” to land a job on the New York Daily News, but Marcia knew that he didn’t stand a chance. With his loud checked jackets and string neckties, they wouldn’t have let him through the front door. Even if they did, he would have soon revealed himself as a lousy reporter. He couldn’t spell; he couldn’t put a sentence together. These faults might have been overlooked if he’d had a flair for gathering news, but he didn’t. Even when he got a good story, he managed to screw up the facts. Add to that his brash demeanor, his beer-belly, his late-blooming acne, and it was difficult for Marcia to imagine how he’d even managed to get a job on the Banner.

The phone rang. Marcia glanced at Ron’s back, emblazoned with big blue and yellow checks. He made no move to answer it. She sighed. The call would probably prove to be a funeral director with an obituary, in which case Ron if he did answer it, would ask her to take it from the eminence of his seniority.

“Banner, Mrs. Creighton.”

“This is Joe Reilly,” the voice on the telephone said. “I have an obit.”

“Just a minute, Mr. Reilly.” Marcia took her Planning Board story out of her typewriter and rolled in a fresh sheet of copy paper.

Unexpectedly, Ron Green heaved his bulk around in his chair. “Hey, is that Joe Reilly?” he demanded. “I been trying to get that son of a bitch all day.”

Before Marcia could react, he picked up the phone and started talking. She hung up her extension and waited, not patiently. He could have let her take the obit before crashing in like that; but good manners didn’t go with his Front Page act.

“Yeah, I been trying to reach you, Reilly, Yeah, Ron Green. Listen…I know…I know…of course. No, of course not. Yeah, well, news, what news is, it’s sometimes embarrassing, that’s the name of the game, you know? No…no…now, wait a minute…wait just one minute. Look, Reilly, if a stiff gets up and walks around in your joint, that’s news, I don’t give a shit whose stiff it is…What’s that supposed to mean? Hey, wait a minute!”

“My God,” Marcia said into the silence that followed. “What was that all about?”

“The son of a bitch hung up on me,” Ron said. He seemed amazed and aggrieved, even though people were always hanging up on him. “Listen, if he calls back, give him to me, will you?”

“All right, but what’s it all about?”

“What it’s all about is a lot of crap, if you ask me,” Ron said, turning his plaid back to her once more and dialing the phone with the receiver cradled between his cheek and his shoulder. “But you never can tell.”

Marcia seethed with a mixture of annoyance and curiosity, but she knew Ron well enough not to show either. If she criticized his bad manners, they would get worse. If she accused him of teasing her with mysterious hints, he would positively torture her with them. He refused to take her seriously as a person, much less as a newspaperwoman. She suspected he acted this way because he felt uncomfortable with women, especially with pretty ones.

In describing herself as a pretty woman, Marcia believed she was merely acknowledging a fact of her existence, no more or less important than the fact that she had two feet. She felt no special tingle of vanity. She had grown accustomed to living with the knowledge.

She did little to enhance her good looks. She disdained makeup. Her black hair was long and straight, parted simply in the middle, and she wore whatever seemed comfortable. Nora Curtis, who never failed to pass along unkindly remarks, and who normally bedizened herself like the Queen of the Gypsies from a creaky old operetta, said that Marcia’s neighbors slightingly referred to her as “the local beatnik.”

It didn’t matter. After all she’d been through in her life, the opinions of her neighbors didn’t mean much. Security was the only thing that really mattered: security for herself and her children.

The telephone interrupted her thoughts.

“Banner, Mrs. Creighton.”

“This is Joe Reilly again. Can I give you that obit, please, without talking to that other guy?”

If she kept her unthinking promise to Ron, she would only prolong her stay. She lowered her voice and said, “Sure, I guess. Only…well, I’m kind of curious about it myself now.”

“Being a funeral director isn’t easy, Mrs. Creighton. Some people don’t realize there are some things you just don’t make jokes about. Not that I mind; nothing bothers me, I’ve heard it all. I got all that nonsense out of my system when I was studying for my profession. But to the people, the bereaved relatives, nothing could be crueler than having fun at their expense. Do you follow me? I’ve got to protect their feelings and maintain what you might call the proper image of my profession. A story like that, you put it in the newspaper, it might be good for a laugh to some sick people, but it’s going to cause grief elsewhere, and minimizing grief, well, that’s what my life’s work is all about. Do you follow me?”

“Well, yes, but I don’t know what the…Ah.… incident was that you’re referring to.”

“There wasn’t any incident. One of my assistants, a young fellow just out of school…maybe he was drinking, I don’t know. I hope not. I’m a fair man; I’ve given him another chance. What bothers me is he told somebody about it and it got back to your friend there. This is all off the record, isn’t it?”

Marcia restrained her exasperation. He hadn’t told her a thing, on or off the record. Maybe Ron Green would get around to telling her. It didn’t matter. Time was passing, and she wanted to finish up and go home.

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll take the obit now.”

It was after ten when Marcia had finished her story about the Planning Board. She put her copy in Higgins’s in basket and returned to her desk to straighten it up. Ron Green was sitting on the edge of her desk. He was apparently in a mood to talk now.

“Let’s go have a drink,” he said.

She was mildly surprised, and that made her delay a refusal that should have been automatic. “Thanks, but I have to get home. I’m late already.”

“Don’t you ever relax?”

It was an odd question, since she had so recently been wondering the same thing about him. “Of course,” she said a little stiffly. “But I don’t drink.”

“And you don’t smoke and you don’t swear. That’s what fascinates me about you. Did anybody ever tell you that you look like a witch?”

“No.”

“I don’t mean the Wicked Witch of the West, with the crooked nose and all, I mean a cute Hollywood version of a witch. Black hair and high cheekbones and hollow eyes. And a widow’s peak. You could bewitch me anytime.”

“I just want to go home to my husband and my kiddies, Ron. You’ll have to find somebody else to bewitch you.”

“That’s always the story,” he sighed.

He was flustering her. She didn’t find him at all attractive, but it had been a long time since any man had turned such determined, concentrated attention on her. Coming from Ron Green, it was doubly surprising, as if the water cooler had made a pass at her.

She tried to change the subject. “What were you bugging Joe Reilly about? That sounded kind of interesting, what I heard of it.”

“I figured a witch would be interested. Maybe you’ve got some competition in town. Unless you’re responsible. Have you been going around raising the dead lately?”

“Are you going to answer my question, or are you just going to keep being silly?” she said firmly. She slung her bag to her shoulder, making it clear she planned to leave.

“I couldn’t check it out. What we’d be doing if we printed it, we’d just be making this guy at the funeral home look like an asshole, that’s all.”

She tried not to betray her feelings at his choice of words. If she did, his language would get even worse.

“Anyway,” he continued, “the way I heard it, this assistant was working alone there last night at Reilly’s. He had drained all the blood out of a stiff and was getting set to pump it full of formaldehyde when it got up to take a stroll. It was a guy who’d been in an auto accident, and he wasn’t much to look at, so I guess it was what you would call unnerving. So the stiff gets to the door, maybe ten feet away, and then collapses. The guy who saw it, just a kid actually, he shits his pants and goes running for a cop. The cop sees the corpse laying by the door, but of course he doesn’t see how it got there, and what’s he going to do, arrest it? So he helps the kid dump it on the table and stays there holding his hand while he finishes the work. That’s all there is to it.”

Fascinated against her will, Marcia had sat down at her desk again. “Are they sure he was dead?” she asked.

“Oh, hell, yes. If he wasn’t dead from the accident, he was dead by the time the undertaker pumped him out. But there was no question about it, because the ME said the steering column got him right in the heart. I was just talking to the Medical Examiner and he said he’s heard of some pretty bizarre muscular spasms some time after death, but this takes the cake. He didn’t come right out and say it was impossible, though. I think it’s a cute story. But now the assistant won’t talk, and the cop don’t know nothing, and Reilly says he’ll sue us if we print it. Fuck it. Tomorrow a man will bite a dog, mark my words. How about that drink?”

“Thanks again, but no again. I have to get home.”

“Listen, kiddo,” he called after her as she walked to the door. “Some day Robert Redford is going to play me in the movies, and if he asked you for a drink, you’d go. So why not grab the real thing while you got the chance?”