Carl Hiassen - Basket Case

So, as anticipated, it will be impossible to pin the kidnapping on Jimmy's widow. After what happened last night, the crime is destined to remain unreported anyway. Mrs. Stomarti will get away with everything, except her dead husband's song.

I can live with that. We got Emma back.

While the omelette is frying, she ambushes me with a boisterous hug. "You are hereby forbidden from touching a loaded firearm ever again," she teases.

"I told you how much I hated those damn things."

"From what I remember, you were very gallant last night."

"Lucky I didn't shoot off my own fingers."

"You still saved our lives. Think about it, Jack."

I haven't told Emma what happened to Jerry and Loreal. She was in dreamland when Juan and I went to find them.

"The men who kidnapped you died in the airboat crash."

After a troubled pause, Emma asks: "You're sure?"

"You've heard of blunt trauma? This was the opposite."

"Should we call the police?"

"And tell them what—the dead guys tried to kill us to cover up the theft of a pop song? The cops would roll us both in bubble wrap and ship us to the psycho wing at Charity."

Breakfast turns into a quiet affair. Emma isn't angry; she's engrossed. It's no small weight to bear, the experience of a soul-rattling event that may never be acknowledged.

Yet that's how it must be. There was no abduction. No meeting on the lake. No lethal chase.

Emma says, "But what if somebody figures out—"

"Never. It was an accident. The weather was lousy, the sky was dark."

"I understand, Jack."

The Union-Register sits in a lawn wrapper on the counter; I haven't got the appetite to peek at the front page. Emma opens it and spies the headline. "What! Why didn't you tell me?"

"I was waiting until the drugs wore off."

Excitedly she slips on her reading glasses and spreads the paper over the table, across the breakfast platters. "That figures—Old Man Polk finally dies and I'm not there to edit the story."

"Read it aloud," I say.

She gives me a peckish look. "Well, aren't you something."

"Please?"

So she reads to me:

The man who shaped and guided the Union-Register for nearly four decades passed away Friday after a long illness. Mac Arthur Polk was 88.

A community icon and fervid philanthropist, Polk died at his Silver Beach home with his wife Ellen at his side. Friends said the couple was playing Chinese checkers when he collapsed.

Though he had been in failing health for some time, Polk remained engaged and outspoken, never losing his passion for the newspaper he inherited from his father.

In an interview last week at Charity Hospital, he said, "There's no greater privilege than publishing a daily newspaper, and no greater responsibility than delivering the truth, even when it ain't so pretty."

Emma glances up. "He really say that?"

"Word for word. Did young Maggad's quote make it on the front?"

"If it didn't, somebody's out of a job." Emma continues:

Headstrong and visionary, Polk transformed the Union-Register from a folksy, small-town journal to a dynamic, award-winning newspaper with an increasingly urban circulation of 82,500 weekdays and nearly 91,000 on Sundays.

"We turned it into a first-class outfit," he said. "The conscience of the community."

The only son of the Union-Register's founder, Ford Polk, the kid known as Mac started in the newsroom fresh out of college as a telephone clerk, working his way up the ladder to managing editor.

When his father retired unexpectedly in 1959 to open a dwarf mink farm, Polk took over as publisher. His firm-handed stewardship of the paper continued until 1997, when he sold it to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for a reported $47 million.

"MacArthur Polk was like a second father to me," said Race Maggad III, the chairman and chief executive officer of Maggad-Feist. "He was a teacher, a friend and an inspiration."

This is too much for Emma, who blurts: "What a hypocritical little prick!"

The old man would be hopping mad, that's for sure.

"Otherwise I think he'd have liked the story," she says. "You did a nice job, Jack, considering all the distractions."

"What are you talking about?" The piece isn't badly done, but plainly it is not my style. "Fervid philanthropist"? Give me a break.

"What I mean," says Emma, "is that it must've been hard to sit down and write this yesterday, waiting for Cleo's goons to call."

"But I didn't write it, Emma. Look at the byline."

"I am looking at the byline."

Lunging forward, I grab the story out of her hands.

Outrageous. That craven sonofabitch Abkazion crumpled like the bumper on a Tijuana taxi. He stuck my name on top of Old Man Polk's obituary!

"Evan wrote this," I protest, waving the newspaper at Emma, "while Juan and I were driving to the lake."

"I don't get it."

"Simple. Maggad ordered me assigned to the obit. Abkazion was scared to piss him off so he put my name on it, thus screwing a decent hardworking kid out of a byline."

"Pretty shitty," Emma concedes.

I turn to the jump page and skim the remainder of the obituary. There, below the last paragraph, is an italicized credit line: Staff intern Evan Richards contributed to this story.

I feel rotten and helpless. So does Emma. "You want me to read the rest of it?" she asks halfheartedly.

"Not aloud. No."

Another illustrious milestone in the career of Jack Tagger Jr. Finally I get back on the front page, and I didn't even write the damn story.

Soon I'll be getting that phone call from Charles Chickle offering the cushy trustee gig, yet even the prospect of being paid to torment Race Maggad III fails to cheer me. What happened to Evan sucks; I hate seeing any reporter get shafted.

Emma tries to help by reminding me that the kid cobbled the old man's obit from my notes, clips and interviews. "It was mostly a rewrite job," she says. "The bulk of the work was yours."

"Nice try." I reach for the phone. "Has our Evan got a listed number?"

He answers on the third ring, which is encouraging. I've known interns who would have already hung themselves in despair.

"Hi, Jack," he says quietly.

I launch a virulently indignant diatribe against shifty spineless editors, which Evan spoils by informing me that he is not the aggrieved party. He didn't write the MacArthur Polk obituary, either.

"I choked, man," he confesses. "Abkazion bailed me out. He grabbed all your notes, sat down at the city desk and banged the whole story out with, like, twenty minutes to deadline."

"I see."

Evan can't stop apologizing, and he's wearing on my nerves like a whining Chihuahua. "Once you told me the obit was for the front page," he says, "my brain locked up big-time. I'm really sorry, Jack."

"Don't be. It was wrong for me to dump it on you like that."

"What do you think Emma's gonna do?"

"To you? Nothing," I say. "I'm the one who's in trouble."

"Really?" the kid says anxiously.

"Oh, she's an animal sometimes. It's scary."

Emma peers curiously over the top of the newspaper. "Who's an animal?"

"See you Monday," I say to Evan, and hang up smiling.

We're back in bed when the telephone rings. Emma's head is resting on my chest and I'm not moving, period.

The answer machine picks up. The call is from Carla Candilla, her voice hushed and urgent.

"Derek really did it! 'Ode to a Brown-Eyed Goddess'—Jack, it was so fucking lame."

She's calling on her cellular from Anne's wedding, which I'd come tantalizingly close to forgetting.

"It took him half an hour to read," Carla says, "meantime I had to pee like a racehorse. I wrote down a couple lines 'cause I knew you could use a laugh."