Читать книгу The Ones We Trust - Kimberly Belle - Страница 14

6

Early Saturday evening, I’m studying my menu in Bar Dupont’s sleek lounge when a rhythmic thump-click, thump-click pierces the chatter around me like the steady beat of a drum. I twist on my bar stool, as do half the people in the place, and find my former boss, Victoria Santillano, coming at me on crutches. She’s wearing an oversize black boot on her right foot and a dragged-down expression, heavy with equal parts crankiness and effort. All long lines and sharp edges, Victoria has always had the hardscrabble air of someone who’s forgotten to exhale, only now she looks pissed about it.

“What the hell happened to you?”

She juts her chin at the dirty martini that, just two seconds before, the bartender slid in front of me. “If that’s vodka, extra cold and extra dirty, I need it far more than you do.”

I signal to the bartender for another and push my still full glass in front of the empty seat next to me. Victoria hobbles up to the stool, flings her crutches against the bar and drinks half the glass in one giant gulp.

“Jesus, that’s good,” she says, smacking her lips.

“Please, tell me that boot isn’t just a scheme to get free cocktails.”

She snorts. “Now that you mention it, it is one of the better perks. But, alas, no. Damn ankle broke in three spots, can you believe it?”

I can’t, actually. Victoria is one of the most indestructible women I’ve ever met. She’s trekked through deserts and jungles, crawled through caves and fields of land mines, chased down thieves and dictators and drug lords, and lived to talk about all of them in front-page, top-billed feature articles. The woman survives on adrenaline and vodka and caffeine, and the only thing I’ve ever known her to break is a nail.

“Were you rappelling off an Afghani cliff? Skydiving into a war zone? Scaling the Kremlin with fish wire and Scotch tape?”

“I fell down the stairs.” Her long, unmanicured finger comes within millimeters of my nose. “And if you tell anyone that’s how I broke my ankle, I’ll have you murdered in your sleep.” She plucks an olive from her glass with two hooked fingers. “So what’s new and exciting in content management these days?”

“Not one goddamn thing.”

“Excellent,” she says, nodding sagely. “Business services, was it?”

“Health care. Health&Wealth.com is the leading health care web magazine for today’s active seniors.”

“Mmm-hmm. Sounds fascinating.”

Victoria buries her nose in her glass, and I do the same with the fresh one the bartender hands me, neither of us quite willing to rehash old arguments. She was there when I broke the Chelsea Vogel scandal three years ago, and she was there two weeks later, after Chelsea was found hanging in her Herndon shower, when I shoved my press pass to the very back of my kitchen junk drawer and handed in my resignation letter. She never questioned my decision to quit. She never, not once, tried to talk me out of it. She just told me to call her when I found my balls.

For the next six months, I sent her every type of ball I could come up with. Soccer balls, baseballs, tennis balls and footballs. A ten-pound bag of meatballs and a monogrammed bowling ball. A framed vintage poster of Lucille Ball. A custom Magic 8 Ball where every side of the triangle popped up as “Hell, yes!” Finally, when I paid a delivery service to dump a box containing a thousand ping-pong balls onto her office floor, she sent me a one-word email. “Uncle,” it said in the subject line, and nothing more. After that, we picked up where we’d left off, with regular email check-ins and cocktails every time she swings through town, which is often.

But we never broach the one subject that hangs between us in gleaming, glittering strobe lights—that by walking away from the Chelsea Vogel aftermath all those years ago, I walked away from my duty as a journalist to seek the truth and report it to the public.

Only now I’ve spent the past thirty-six hours researching an article I’m not writing, looking into a story I’m not covering, and though I’m not certain I’ve found my balls, I have, without a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, found a thirty-sixth soldier. One who was in Zach Armstrong’s convoy of vehicles rumbling down an Afghani street when small-arms fire rained down from the upper level of an abandoned building. One who fought alongside both Armstrong brothers and was returning fire when Zach took three bullets to the head. One whose interview was cataloged and then buried, whose name disappeared from every army account except one—the uncensored transcript I’m not supposed to have.

“What?” Victoria says, studying me with squinty eyes.

“What do you mean, what?”

“I mean, what’s going on here? You have that look about you, like maybe I should check between your teeth for canary feathers.”

My skin prickles, and my scalp buzzes with the thrill of new knowledge I can’t hold in another second. “Okay, so I’m not saying I’m writing anything, but say I know something that no one else knows about the Zach Armstrong story. Something new. Something earth-shattering and groundbreaking.”

“How earth-shattering and groundbreaking?”

“Enough that the DOD buried it.”

Victoria takes in my words like a seasoned journalist who’s seen and heard it all, with a pursed-lipped nod. She reaches for her martini. “I see. And what exactly did they bury?”

“A name.”

She looks up from her glass with an arched brow, the same arched brow I’ve seen her use on rapists and swindlers and serial killers, when she asked them if perhaps they shouldn’t have wiped down the door handle after leaving their prints all over it. “A soldier’s name?”

I confirm it with my own pursed-lipped nod, but I don’t reveal anything more. The thing is, as much as I like Victoria, she is completely ruthless when she smells a story. Even back when I worked for her, when she served as both my boss and my mentor, I was always careful to never reveal too much until I sent her the final copy. I didn’t trust her, not completely, to not run off with my story.

But since Ricky’s name has been wiped from every report the DOD or army has published, I’m fairly certain that no matter how hard Victoria looks, she’ll never find him.

“Where’s my Magic 8 Ball when I need it?” Victoria pounds a fist on the polished maple bar, and her next words pierce the music and bar chatter like a bomb siren. “Hell, yes! I knew it!”

Packed with corporate executives and political insiders, the Bar Dupont crowd is a seen-it-all-heard-it-all kind of crowd, but still. More than a few heads swing our way at Victoria’s outburst.

I try to ignore their curious looks. “Knew what?”

“That you’d be back eventually. Send me what you’ve got whenever it’s ready. If I don’t have a spot for it, I’ll make one. How many words, do you think? Three thousand? Four?”

“Hold up. I never said I was writing anything.”

“Please.” She waves a palm through the air, takes a long pull from her glass.

“Please what?”

She rolls her unmascaraed eyes and thunks her glass onto the bar hard enough to send liquid sloshing over the sides. “Please, stop fooling yourself, because you’re not fooling me. The very fact that we are sitting here, talking about Zach Armstrong, is proof you’re already writing the piece in your head. You didn’t tell me about the additional soldier because you were filling me in on what’s been going on in your life. You were looking for validation, and you knew I’d give it to you.”

Well, hell. Does Victoria have a point? Did I come here looking for her to tell me to write the Armstrong story? It’s a theory I hadn’t thought of yet, though I certainly am now, and the answer is maybe.

The truth is, discovering Ricky’s name has cracked something open inside of me, something that feels as if it’s been hibernating for a really long, really harsh winter and now might be ready to step into the early-spring sunshine. And while I’m certainly not already writing the piece in my head, why not hand him over to Victoria instead?

Because he’s my lead.

At the unwelcome thought, a familiar and greedy rush, as uncomfortable as an old, itchy sweater, warms my blood and coats my skin like a rash.

Victoria must read the indecision on my face, because she drains her glass, signals for another round, then twists on the bar stool to face me.

“I’ll tell you what the wisest journalist I know once said, and that is this. Our profession holds the power to be a force for good, and in the end, credit will go to the ones of us in the ring, the ones covered in sweat and blood and tears, and not the ones watching from the safety of the sidelines. Get out there, and be fully informed, fully aware and fully engaged. Be part of a force for good.”

“You said that, last year in a graduation speech at Princeton.”

“Harvard, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is the message. Are you or are you not going to be part of the force for good?”

“I was part of the force for good, remember? Until I became the cause of something bad.”

“How many times do I have to say it?” Victoria leans into me, her tone fierce and forceful. “Chelsea Vogel’s death was a tragedy, but you did exactly what you were supposed to do, and that was report the facts. The decisions and actions were all Chelsea’s. She slept with her female assistant, she took her own life. As much as you seem to enjoy playing the part of martyr, you are not responsible for her death.”

“I’m not sure I agree.” I tell her about Ben Vogel’s surprise appearance at my front door, and my taking another, closer look at Maria in light of her nouveau-riche lifestyle and pornographic internet performance. “Only, if what I now suspect is true and Maria is not as innocent as she led everyone to believe, then I’m even more responsible than I thought.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe Maria didn’t realize her sexual prowess until she gained some with Chelsea. Maybe it took seeing how those videos went viral the first time around for her to come up with a plan to do it again, this time for a wad of cash. My point is, Chelsea’s story is not finished. There’s more to tell, and there’s no one on the planet more qualified—or more justified—to tell it than you. Expose Maria as a conniving slut who ruins lives and sleeps with anything with money or power if that’s what she is. Set the record straight.”

“Maybe she’s not a conniving slut at all. Maybe she won the lottery or...I don’t know, found a pot of gold.”

“Only one way to find out.”

Victoria doesn’t say the rest. She doesn’t have to. She’s telling me to dig deeper into Maria’s story, to do the research, to search out the facts. But she doesn’t have to tell me to do that, either. I’ve already got Floyd on the case. No matter what I end up doing with the answer—handing it over to Ben or stuffing it in a box and pushing it to the very back corner of my mind—I already plan to find out.

But still.

“What if I write something, and it happens all over again? What if somebody gets hurt?”

“Somebody always gets hurt, Abigail.” Victoria lifts her shoulders high enough to brush the ends of her fringy bob, then turns back to her drink. “But if you do your job right, nine times out of ten it’s the bad guy.”