Andrew Klavan - True Crime

“Put Everett on it,” Alan said. “The interview and the execution, both. Put him on both.”

Alan sipped his coffee, letting the blow sink deep. Drawing out the moment. He knew how Bob felt about me.

“Steve’s not here,” Bob said, quickly, but without much hope. “He was on the cops all weekend. He’s got the day off.”

“Not anymore he hasn’t. We need him. Whatshisname, down at Osage, the warden-Plunkitt-Steve’s dealt with him before. I can get him in. And Beachum’s not gonna care who he talks to.” He sipped his coffee again. He loved arguments like this.

But Bob felt wary, he felt he had to be careful. He didn’t feel it would be politic to run me down. Alan Mann and I were friends, good friends; we went way back. Alan had been a professor when I first came to Columbia. Later on, he left to take a job as a city editor and, when I graduated, he helped me get a job at the paper where he worked. We were there together for five years before he returned to his native Missouri. And when he heard I’d been fired and couldn’t find a spot in New York anymore, he called me up and urged me to come join him at the News . We’d always got along, the two of us, despite the difference in our ages. We drank together after work sometimes. Our families had Sunday dinners together. All the same, Bob felt strongly about this-and he never backed away from a confrontation with anyone who scared him as much as Alan did. It was a point of honor.

“I’m sure I can get Harvey past Plunkitt too,” he said in his soft, reasonable voice. “Plunkitt prides himself on his good relations with the press.”

“And you think Everett’s an asshole,” Alan said.

“I don’t think he’s an asshole …”

“You’re wrong. He is an asshole. Trust me: I know him. A lot of people who’re good at their jobs are assholes, Bob.”

Bob raised his hand in that calming gesture. “I know that, Alan.”

“If I had to run this paper without assholes, it’d be a circular.”

Bob smiled, by way of appeasement. But he wasn’t giving up. “It’s just that I think Everett is stronger on the news angles. I don’t mind him covering the execution itself. But the interview, basically, is a feature sidebar. Michelle was looking for some emotional stuff to tag her story with.”

“Her story?” said Alan loudly. “The Incoming Michelle Fire?” He set his styro down on the desk. He was really getting into this now. “Listen. I think it stinks that Michelle’s gonna die. A girl in her twenties? If I ran the world that’d never happen, believe me. But all the same, you know Michelle’s sidebars as well as I do. She wouldn’t know a good angle if it bit her on her college-girl ass. Everett would.”

“A news angle, but this is an issue piece.”

Alan reared up, wide-eyed. “An issue piece? Whoa! Dog my cats! An issue piece.”

“Come on, Alan …”

“What’s the issue?”

“Capital punishment is the issue. I mean, the state is putting a man to death tonight, Alan.”

“An issue piece. Well, stone the crows.”

“And Harvey’s much better on that kind of thing. If Plunkitt won’t let him in for the interview, we’ll do it over the phone.”

“An issue piece.” Alan tilted back in his chair, hardly able to contain his glee.

Bob was beginning to feel a little desperate, and a little angry too. He had his own reasons for not wanting to call me in, most of them emotional. But you know the way arguments go: he had made up some logical excuses to explain his feelings, and now he believed in them. He felt they were self-evident. He felt that anyone who disagreed was missing the point. And explaining these things to you as if you were a child was one of Bob’s personal failings.

So he said, very deliberately, raising that open hand of his again, “Look: this guy, Beachum, he isn’t gonna give us any news. He’s not gonna tell us any information we haven’t heard before. That’s not the point. The point is-on a story like this-we want people to get the feel of what it’s like to be waiting for the state to pump poison into your arm. I mean, we execute people every couple of months in this state and it usually winds up on page three of the regional, maybe the front of the metro. Now, all right, this is a St. Louis story, which makes it bigger for us. But the only way to justify making it this big is to humanize this guy, to get at the humanity of the whole filthy thing. We want to make the reader understand that this is what capital punishment is: it’s killing another human being. And yes, I think that’s an important issue.”

“You do, huh?” said Alan, hoisting one heavy brow. “And what about Amy Whatsherface, the pregnant broad old Frankie boy shot in the throat? What about her humanity? Is that part of the issue?”

“Well, yes.”

“I mean, we had Everett in here all weekend because sixteen people were shot in two days- sixteen -four of them dead. What about that issue?”

“All right, well, that’s an issue too.”

“Michelle thought the issue was pee-pees and woo-woos, I don’t know what-all the hell she thought. So who’s gonna get to call what the issue is in this issue piece?” Practically leering, Alan came forward in his chair. He loved this, he loved it. He grabbed the greasy bag on his desk; he couldn’t resist anymore. “You want a piece of crumb cake?”

“No,” said Bob. “No.”

Alan pulled the cake slab out and chomped it. “Let me tell you something,” he mumbled around the mouthful. “Issues-issues are what we make up to give us an excuse to run good stories. A judge grabs an attorney’s breasts, it’s the sex discrimination issue. A nine-year-old shoots his brother with an Uzi, it’s the child violence issue. People want to read about sex organs and blood and we make issues out of them to give them an excuse. That’s what makes us a quality paper instead of a cheap tabloid: hypocrisy.”

Bob threw up his hands and indulged in some of his gentle irony. “Well, then I guess I should call Steve,” he said softly. “That describes his attitude exactly.”

Alan sat back again, leisurely, chewing, crumb cake in hand. His brooding, hawklike face was angled upward, eyebrows to chin. A second breakfast, a journalistic argument, a chance to dominate Bob: aside from one of his reporters getting herself killed, this was turning out to be a jolly old morning after all. “Let me tell you something about Steve Everett,” he said, brushing crumbs off his tie with his free hand. “You know why he was kicked out of New York? Do you know this story?”

Bob admitted he didn’t.

“He busted the mayor,” Alan said. “During the scandals? The mayor of fucking New York. Steve got hold of a secret memo on a contract bribe between hizzoner and one of the ex-borough presidents. The borough president was ready to back it up too. He didn’t care: he’d already been convicted. Steve went with it in his column. And the next morning: no column. The paper killed it. Steve comes in and raises hell and all of a sudden he finds himself called on the carpet before the boys upstairs. Surprise, surprise-what do you know? It turns out the paper’s owner is in bed with the mayor. Like some kind of real estate, zoning thing; I don’t know what-all. Steve went ballistic. He says the column runs or he walks. And that’s how the mayor retired with honor and why the city of St. Louis is graced with Everett’s august presence this very day.”

Alan popped the last hunk of crumb cake into his mouth and licked the tips of his fingers like a big, satisfied cat. Next to dancing with his wife, toying with the minds of his underlings was one of his chief pleasures in life. And with Bob especially; I guess because he was so serious, so earnest. This story about me, for instance-an honest reporter getting run out of town by dirty politicians: it was something that would happen in a movie. It would be what they call the hero’s “backstory,” the stuff that happened before the movie starts. The editor-in-chief would reveal it to the city editor about fifteen minutes in, and then you’d know the hero was a good guy, in spite of his quirks; a guy you could trust.