C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

Friday, April 7

Aubrey’s story on the dead prostitute was terrific. It turned out she’d been an outstanding basketball player in high school. The sports department had even run a feature on her. “For all her physical gifts it’s her heart that puts her head and shoulders above the rest,” her coach said at the time. Aubrey re-ran that old quote from the coach and added this new one: “If she hadn’t gotten pregnant and dropped out, she could have gotten a full-ride from any number of colleges. Now she’s just another dead girl from the inner city.”

The rest of the week Aubrey concentrated on her investigation of the 3rd District. She got several officers, some retired and some still on the job, to talk off the record about Commander Lionel Percy. She compiled all kinds of crime figures, contrasting the 3rd to other districts in the city. Eric and I pulled together all the old stories on past corruption we could find. By Thursday she’d interviewed Chief Polceznec and Mayor Flynn-neither of whom had much of anything to say-as well as several members of City Council and a number of self-appointed community leaders-all of whom had plenty to say.

By Friday afternoon, Aubrey’s story was pretty much finished except for an interview with Lionel Percy himself. He called her back at six-thirty and told her she had exactly one minute to ask her “worthless questions.” So she started rattling off various facts and accusations. He answered, “Same old tired shit” to every one of them. Before hanging up he said this: “If those dumbfucks on City Council think they can do a better job cleaning up the 3rd, let them gather up their shit shovels and come on down.”

Aubrey put the quotes in her story and sent it to the desk, knowing they’d never get past Dale Marabout.

Which they didn’t. Quotes like that wouldn’t get by any copy editor on any newspaper. So Dale told her to kill the quotes and paraphrase, the tried-and-true trick for circumventing profanity. When Aubrey refused to paraphrase, Dale rewrote the story himself, which sent Aubrey straight to Tinker.

People in the newsroom still debate whether Aubrey intentionally set up a confrontation between Tinker and Dale. I can go either way. One thing was sure, Aubrey knew Tinker’s mind better than the rest of us. Tinker told Dale to put the quotes back in and dash the bad words, s-t, dumbf--s.

Dale shouted, “You’ve got to be kidding!”

Tinker shouted back that he wasn’t: “Lionel Percy had the opportunity to answer our questions any way he chose. Readers have a right to know how he chose.”

Dale filibustered about the Herald-Union being a family paper, about our never using language like that before, not even with the appropriate dashes.

Tinker threw back his head and shared his disbelief with the fluorescent lights. “This is the twenty-first century, Marabout. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about those words anymore.”

“Then why not print them without the dashes?” Dale wondered. Even the sports guys were gathering around the metro desk now.

Tinker continued to commiserate with the lights. You just knew he was wondering why on earth he’d accepted the transfer from our paper in Baton Rouge. In his three years as managing editor down there, he’d not only stopped the paper’s horrible slide in circulation, he’d helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize. He’d done all the usual things papers do when panic sets in-he redesigned the paper to look like USA Today, created trendy new sections to appeal to people’s active lifestyles, and put pictures of the paper’s columnists on the sides of buses. But the biggest thing he did was spice up the reporting. The Business Week feature on him recounted a pep talk he gave reporters one afternoon: He stood on his desk and told them to start writing like the novelists they all really wanted to be. “Treat the truth just like it’s fiction,” he was quoted as saying.

Tinker wasn’t up on his desk now, but he was joyously giving the same sort of speech. “From now on,” he said, “when profanity is pertinent to a story, we dash it and run it.”

Dale, to his credit, didn’t back off. “And how is it pertinent here, Tinker? Everybody knows cops have garbage mouths. All you’re trying to do is sell papers.”

Tinker’s head lowered as slowly as my automatic garage door. “And you’re not trying to sell papers, Marabout? I’m not so happy to hear that.”

Well, that’s how it went. Dale lost the argument and on Saturday the story ran with the dashes. Dale called me at home on Sunday. He tried to sound carefree and chatty, but I knew he was worried. “People do need to know what kind of bastard Lionel Percy is,” he admitted, “and maybe Aubrey’s story will do some good. But she’s going to pay for it. She’s made one of their own look bad. They’ll close ranks, freeze her out for a couple of months until it looks like she’s sloughing off, then feed her bad information on some big story to make her look incompetent.”

“She’s hard as nails,” I said.

That made him laugh. “You used to tell me I was hard as nails. Now I’m just another worn-out lump on the copy desk.”

It was the first sexual innuendo between us in years-if you want to call anything that blatant an innuendo. I let it go by. “You’re a good copy editor,” I said.

I spent the rest of the day kicking myself for that good copy editor remark. What a horrible thing to say. It was like praising some old geezer architect for the log cabin he was building out of Popsicle sticks at the rest home. At least I knew he was probably kicking himself for his hard as nails crack. We’d been lovers once. But Father Time and that damned kindergarten teacher had put an end to that. Now we were friends. That was enough.

Saturday, April 15

Letters to the editor started pouring in on Monday. By fifty to one they lambasted us for sinking to such a new low. The girls in circulation were busy all day with people calling to cancel their subscriptions. At Tuesday night’s City Council meeting, several of the backbenchers used language they wouldn’t have dared using in public before, presumably in the hope of finally being quoted in the paper. On Wednesday, Charlie Chimera, afternoon drive-time host on WFLO, ranted all four of his hours about what he repeatedly called the Herald-Union’ s, “disgusting descent into the murky mire of irresponsibility.” Every caller agreed with him.

Our circulation started climbing back up on Thursday.

Finally it was Saturday again and Aubrey and I were on our way to see Tim Bandicoot.

At first we discussed the weather-the first thing all Ohioans discuss when they crawl into a car-and then why Tim Bandicoot would agree to talk to us about Sissy James. “It sure can’t be for the free publicity,” I said. “Sissy’s name all over the front page could destroy him.”

“I’m the enemy,” Aubrey said. “He wants to take my measure.”

“Take your measure? Somebody’s been watching too many old movies.”

She knew I was joking. She also knew I was taking her down a few pegs. “Then how about this?” she asked. “He knows Sissy will be all over the front page with or without his cooperation. So he might as well appear helpful.”

“ Appear being the key word?”

She repeated my question as a declarative sentence. “Appear being the key word.”

“Which raises all sorts of possibilities?”

“Which raises all sorts of possibilities.”

Tim Bandicoot’s New Day Epiphany Temple was located east of downtown, on Lutheran Hill, at the corner of Cleveland and Cather, an old commercial district that once served the city’s German enclave. By the Fifties those Germans had been absorbed by other ethnic groups and other neighborhoods. Today Lutheran Hill is populated by South Koreans, Pakistanis, poor blacks and even poorer Appalachian whites. Three-quarters of the storefronts are empty.