Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

Szanto started nodding. “Not bad,” he said.

“Boss,” I said. “The Stuff is the story.”

Szanto grabbed his industrial-sized jar of antacid tablets, poured out a few, and started munching on them with a faraway look.

“Do the police know this?” he said through a mouthful of chalk.

“I doubt it.”

He chewed a bit more, swallowed, picked up his phone and punched four numbers on the keypad.

“Hi, chief,” he said. “You got a second?”

Szanto only called one person “chief,” and that was our esteemed executive editor, Harold Brodie.

“Come on,” Szanto said after he replaced the phone in its cradle. “Let’s take a walk.”

The corner office of the Eagle-Examiner newsroom was a strange and foreign land, one I almost never visited. It’s not that Brodie was unfriendly or unapproachable. Quite the contrary. And with his unkempt eyebrows and womanly voice, he looked and sounded like your aging uncle Mortie-the guy who wasn’t really your uncle but was such a dear family friend everyone called him “uncle” anyway. Yet for whatever reason he still scared the crap out of me.

I suppose it was a bit of a stormtrooper-Darth Vader thing. Because, in my dealings outside the newsroom, I got to be the badass stormtrooper. I had my body armor, my helmet, my blaster. I could do serious damage-to someone’s reputation, anyway-and was treated with corresponding deference. Except when I was around Brodie, I knew all he had to do was wave his hand and I would end up writhing on the floor, gasping for my last breath.

More than anything, I just didn’t know the man all that well. In the seven years I had been working for the Eagle-Examiner -ever since being hired from a much smaller daily paper in Pennsylvania-I had spoken with him one-on-one perhaps four times. And one of those I was stoned.

In the management structure of our paper, there was never a need for me to speak to him. I talked exclusively to editors who reported to him, or sometimes editors who reported to other editors who reported to him. It’s like I had been playing telephone with him my entire career.

Szanto, who obviously had no such issues, walked into Brodie’s office without knocking. The old man had been playing classical music on a tiny radio, which he turned down as we entered.

“Hi, chief,” Szanto said.

I just smiled. This was my other problem with Brodie. I got so nervous around him I ended up sounding like a moron every time I opened my mouth. So I decided to keep it shut this time. I mean, think about it, do you ever hear a stormtrooper say anything around Darth Vader?

“Carter, my boy, how are you? A little headachy this morning, I guess?”

I kept smiling and nodded. The ganja guy was a man of few words.

“That’s a good lad,” Brodie said, his Mr. Potato Head eyebrows dancing. “So tell me about this new development.”

Szanto did the talking, laying out everything I had just told him in slightly more succinct fashion. Brodie absorbed it, looking more amused than angry that the story his paper had been putting forth the past two days had been flat wrong.

“Sounds like the police were just whistling Dixie with that whole bar angle, eh?” Brodie said when Szanto was done. “I’ll have to give the police director a hard time about that the next time I see him at a benefit.”

Brodie tented his fingers for a moment, resting his lips on them.

“So, Carter, do you feel like you have a story you can put in the paper?” Brodie asked.

The dreaded direct question. Must speak.

“Well, yes and no, sir,” I said.

“Which part is yes, and which part is no?” Brodie asked, managing to sound pleasant despite the rather pointed nature of the question.

“Yes, I feel certain that The Stuff is the connection between the four dead people. Yes, I’m fairly certain they all hooked up with their source in jail. No, I don’t know who that source is. No, I haven’t the slightest idea why it got them killed.”

“Do you have any good leads?”

I gulped.

“Not especially,” I admitted.

More tenting of fingers followed as the executive editor settled into what was known around here as the Brodie Think. The old man was legendary for it. Reporters who found themselves in his office more frequently than I did talked about it all the time. He would just sit there. And think. And think. And think. He would do it until an answer came to him, however long that was. Sometimes-as was the case here-he even closed his eyes. It had all the appearance of advanced narcolepsy.

Brodie didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable with the silence. Szanto was accustomed to it, as well. For infrequent visitors such as myself, it was agonizing.

Still, it had its benefits. There was nothing worse to a reporter than a lack of direction from the top. Because more often than not, there were at least three different ways you could go with a story, any of which was at least somewhat defensible. You could reach your own conclusion about which way was best and start traveling that path. But if the executive editor decided differently, it meant you had gone the wrong way. Once the great Brodie Think was over, at least I’d know where to head.

Finally, he opened his eyes.

“Let’s take this one step at a time,” he proclaimed. “Eventually, we’re going to need to figure out where The Stuff is coming from. But I think in the meantime, we should write what we know and see what happens when we put it in the paper.”

I nodded.

“Have you heard any footsteps on this story?” he asked.

That was newspaper speak for “are there any other media outlets working on the same angle that might blow our scoop?”

“I don’t think anyone is even near this,” I said.

“TV has been repackaging sound bites,” Szanto added. “The other papers are just going with the usual shock and outrage.”

“Good. Then there’s no need to rush this into tomorrow’s editions. Think you can have it ready for Friday’s paper?”

I nodded again.

“Good boy,” Brodie said. “Now why don’t you go home and get some rest?”

I excused myself from the great man’s office, thankful to have escaped without sounding like an imbecile for once. And then I took the great man’s advice. I owed myself some sack time.

I aimed my trusty Malibu toward Nutley, suddenly realizing how eager I was to get home. I needed to unwind in my tidy bungalow, away from the world. I know that personality test-the Myers-Whateveritscalled-says we’re either extroverts or introverts. I think we’re all a little bit of both. The last million years of evolution have turned us into social animals, but somewhere before that in our family tree, there was a branch that just wanted to be left alone. That’s what my bungalow is: a place where I can be an introvert.

Deadline did not stir upon my entrance-Deadline could sleep through nuclear testing-and I settled into the couch and pondered Brodie’s plan to write what we knew, even though we only had half the story. The more I thought, the more I liked it. There are times when it makes sense to hold back and drop a big bomb on people all at once, when you have the full picture. This didn’t feel like one of them.

Truth was, publishing a story is one of the most underappreciated reporting techniques out there. Sometimes it lets the right person know you’re on the right track and it makes them want to push you a little further along. You just never know what it flushes out.

After a night of uninterrupted, undrunk slumber, it would stand to reason I would feel unhungover, uncrappy, and in all other ways more human than I had the day before. Yet as the sun crept around the shades of my bungalow’s master bedroom, I still felt lousy. Someday, science will have to explain why a bad night’s sleep hits you harder the second day.