Bloodlines

The homicide detective working on the case was a man I had known in Bakersfield, Frank Harriman. Though he moved to Las Piernas in 1985, we didn’t manage to reco

I’m Irish enough to think O’Co

Maybe because I held the key to his storage unit in my hand, I could feel him looking over my shoulder in the newsroom that morning. I still missed him terribly and often wished I could hold another conversation with him, to tell him he was right, that newspaper work was in my blood, and that I had wanted to come back to the Express all along-but mostly to listen to his voice, his laughter, at least one more time.

I looked around me and wondered if he would want to work here these days. Not so much as a whiff of cigarette smoke, but that wouldn’t have bothered him. A bigger problem would be that a Starbucks Double Latte was about the strongest drink anyone kept near his desk.

No, that wouldn’t be the biggest problem. The biggest problem would be that someone had come by, vampirelike, and sucked the life’s blood out of the place while we were all trying to make deadline.

Nearby, I heard other reporters murmuring into headsets and the soft snicking of computer keyboards. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead provided the loudest noise in the room. Quiet as a damned insurance office, and looked like one, too.

A few faces would be familiar to him. John Walters, Mark Baker, Stuart Angert, and Lydia Ames-who was now the city editor. Most of the men who had been hired in the late 1950s and 1960s had taken advantage of retirement packages in recent months, unable to watch the paper change as it had under Winston Wrigley III’s latest overhaul. We were losing a lot of people who had ten to twenty years in, too.

Circulation was down, and Wrigley was engaging in desperate measures these days. In the past few months, photographs had taken up more room than text on the front pages of every section. “What are we afraid of-readers?” one veteran reporter had said to me, just before he left. “Soon we’ll be giving out crayons to new subscribers.”

Another plan involved keeping stories to about two column inches each. All right, that’s an exaggeration, but as one of my colleagues said, “We used to have sidebars longer than these stories.”

The paper would have been even worse off if Wrigley’s father had not foreseen that his son might not be up to the job. While he had spoiled his son to a large degree, by the end of his life he had become less willing to excuse his only child’s weaknesses, and grew impatient with his lack of judgment. He couldn’t bring himself to deny him the position held for two generations by men named Winston Wrigley, but he made sure that Wrigley III didn’t inherit controlling stock, and established a Publisher’s Board that his son had to answer to.

Wrigley had less-than-subtle pressure from the board to keep me around, and John Walters covered my back-a loyalty I tried hard to continue to deserve.

To keep costs down, Wrigley insisted that John replace veteran staffers who left the paper with young reporters fresh out of J-school. I didn’t mind working with these newcomers, but I stopped expecting to get to know them very well, because most of them left us after a few months to work for bigger papers. We were becoming a “nursery paper”-a training program for people who would win the Pulitzers at some other paper. That was another sore point among the older staffers. They became unwilling to invest time and effort into teaching the ropes to people who would be gone in less than a year.

My tolerance-and my friendship with Lydia, who had reign over the general assignment reporters-had earned me the keep of two of these fledglings, Hailey Freed and Ethan Shire. They had been assigned desks near mine. As I logged on to my computer that morning, I felt tired just thinking about them.

They had graduated in the same year from the journalism department of Las Piernas University (formerly Las Piernas College-my own degree was issued before the upgrade, and I shuddered to think what they might make of that fact). They had a lot of confidence in themselves and were competitive as all get out, but otherwise, they were as different as they could be from each other.

I sometimes wished they had a little less confidence. Hailey was fairly sure that two years on the campus paper and a summer internship meant she already knew it all and ought to be left alone so that she could pry journalism from the clutches of crones like me, abandon our archaic methods, and improve the paper for the twenty-first century. She didn’t mind letting me know she resented my old-school style of journalism. Clean writing, balanced coverage, fact checking-boring stuff. A little more of her beautiful, semi-poetic but inaccurate reporting and I was going to FedEx her to Tom Wolfe, to force him to live with the results of what seeds he had sown. I would have, until she told me that Wolfe was an old man and that was the old new journalism-she was going to be part of the new new journalism, a revolution on the World Wide Web. I couldn’t wait. In the meantime, I tried to teach her that the lead-the most essential and dramatic information in a news story-was not an acorn to be buried beneath several other paragraphs.

Ethan, who had been a city editor on that same college paper, was damned sure he was destined for better things than the Express. The rest of us just hadn’t realized that we had Jesus in our carpenter shop.

He was also our budding newsroom politician. He shamelessly brown-nosed Wrigley, who in turn made him a pet. He had talent, I thought, but he didn’t seem to be able to concentrate on his work and often took the easy way out on a story. I didn’t think he had quite found the style that was his own, either, because his writing approach was all over the map. When he focused on what he was doing, I recognized a style that needed a little time to mature, but held a lot of promise. Two days later, I would get stories from him that were so obviously a patchwork of other styles, they didn’t read well. I would tell him that while he had done the basic job of collecting facts in these cases, he’d be better off not trying to imitate other writers.

Ethan thought he had charmed me into believing he paid attention to what I told him about his work. Perhaps he thought I couldn’t read-the proof that he was ignoring me was writ large in nearly every story he filed. Lydia was tough on him-stories got kicked back to him or rewritten by surer hands. While Hailey was going to have problems because she hated anyone touching her lovely words, Ethan seemed almost u

No problem. A byline was no longer an honor to be earned. Everyone got one. Most of the time, they got a mug shot pasted next to it, too. Lydia said it was just as well that the public knew who to blame.

Hailey peered at me over the top of her monitor now and asked, “What agency has jurisdiction over cemeteries?”

“No simple answer. California has a Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, which is part of the Department of Consumer Affairs. The federal government maintains veterans’ cemeteries. Some cemeteries belong to religious groups, some to counties, some privately to families.”

“What about the Las Piernas Municipal Cemetery?”

“The city owns that one, and believe it or not, that’s under the care of the Parks and Recreation Department.”

“Oh.”

“What have you got in mind?”

We heard the sound of laughter, and turned to see Ethan talking with Lydia, apparently amusing her. Hailey frowned, probably envying the attention he was getting from the city editor. She had a hard task ahead of her if she was going to compete with Ethan’s charm.