Michael Connelly: The Scarecrow

“Hi, Angela.”

“Mr. Kramer said I should come over.”

They were moving quickly. I had gotten pinked no more than fifteen minutes earlier and already my replacement had come knocking.

“Tell you what,” I said. “It’s Friday afternoon, Angela, and I just got laid off. So let’s not start this now. Let’s get together on Monday morning, okay? We can meet for coffee and then I’ll take you around Parker Center to meet some people. Will that be okay?”

“Yeah, sure. And, um, sorry, you know?”

“Thank you, Angela, but it’s okay. I think it’ll end up being the best thing for me anyway. But if you’re still feeling sorry for me you could come over to the Short Stop tonight and buy me a drink.”

She smiled and got embarrassed because she and I both knew that wasn’t going to happen. Inside the newsroom and out, the new generation didn’t mix with the old. Especially not with me. I was history and she had no time or inclination to associate with the ranks of the fallen. Going to the Short Stop tonight would be like visiting a leper colony.

“Well, maybe some other time,” I said quickly. “I’ll see you Monday morning, okay?”

“Monday morning. And I’ll buy the coffee.”

She smiled and I realized that she was indeed the one who should take Kramer’s advice and try TV.

She turned to go.

“Oh, and Angela?”

“What?”

“Don’t call him Mr. Kramer. This is a newsroom, not a law firm. And most of those guys in charge? They don’t deserve to be called mister. Remember that and you’ll do okay here.”

She smiled again and left me alone. I pulled my chair in close to my computer and opened a new document. I had to crank out a murder story before I could get out of the newsroom and go drown my sorrows in red wine.

Only three other reporters showed up for my wake. Larry Bernard and two guys from the sports desk who might have gone to the Short Stop regardless of my being there. If Angela Cook had shown up it would have been embarrassing.

The Short Stop was on Sunset in Echo Park. That made it close to Dodger Stadium, so presumably it drew its name from the baseball position. It was also close to the Los Angeles Police Academy and that made it a cop bar in its early years. It was the kind of place you’d read about in Joseph Wambaugh novels, where cops came to be with their own kind and the groupies who didn’t judge them. But those days were long past. Echo Park was changing. It was getting Hollywood hip and the cops were crowded out of the Short Stop by the young professionals moving into the neighborhood. The prices went up and the cops found other watering holes. Police paraphernalia still hung on the walls but any cop who stopped in nowadays was simply misinformed.

Still, I liked the place because it was close to downtown and on the way to my house in Hollywood.

It was early, so we had our pick of the stools at the bar. We took the four directly in front of the TV; me, then Larry, and then Shelton and Romano, the two sports guys. I didn’t know them that well, so it was just as well that Larry was between us. They spent most of the time talking about a rumor that all of the sports beats at the paper were going to be shuffled. They were hoping to get a piece of the Dodgers or the Lakers, the premier beats at the paper, with USC football and UCLA basketball close behind. They were good writers like most sports reporters have to be. The art of sports writing always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to find a way to write with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh.

I liked covering the cop shop because usually I was telling the reader a story they didn’t know. I was writing about the bad things that can happen. Life in extremis. The underworld that people sitting at their breakfast table with their toast and coffee have never experienced but want to know about. It gave me a certain juice, made me feel like a prince of the city when I drove home at night.

And I knew as I sat there nursing a glass of cheap red wine that I would miss that most about the job.

“You know what I heard,” Larry said to me, his head turned from the sports guys so he could be confidential.

“No, what?”

“That during one of the buyouts in Baltimore this one guy took the check and on his last day he filed a story that turned out to be completely bogus. He just made the whole thing up.”

“And they printed it?”

“Yeah, they didn’t know until they started getting calls the next day.”

“What was the story about?”

“I don’t know but it was like a big ‘fuck you’ to management.”

I sipped some wine and thought about that.

“Not really,” I said.

“What do you mean? Of course it was.”

“I mean the management probably sat around and nodded and said we got rid of the right guy. If you want to say ‘fuck you,’ then you do something that makes them think they messed up by letting you go. That tells them they should’ve picked somebody else.”

“Yeah, is that what you’re going to do?”

“No, man, I’m just going to go quietly into that good night. I’m going to get a novel published and that will be my fuck-you. In fact, that’s the working title. Fuck You, Kramer. ”

“Right!”

Bernard laughed and we changed the subject. But while I was talking about other things I was thinking about the big fuck-you. I was thinking about the novel I was going to restart and finally finish. I wanted to go home and start writing. I thought maybe it would help me get through the next two weeks if I had it to go home to each night.

My cell phone rang and I saw it was my ex-wife calling. I knew I had to get this one over with. I shoved off the bar stool and headed outside to the parking lot, where it would be quieter.

It was three hours ahead in Washington but the number on the caller ID was her desk phone.

“Keisha, what are you still doing at work?”

I checked my watch. It was almost seven here, almost ten there.

“I’m chasing the Post on a story, waiting for callbacks.”

The beauty and bane of working for a West Coast paper was that the last deadline didn’t come up until at least three hours after the Washington Post and New York Times -the major national competition-had gone to bed. This meant that the L.A. Times always had a shot at matching their scoops or pushing the lead on stories. Come morning, the L.A. Times could end up out front on a major story with the latest and best information. It also made the online edition must-reading in the halls of government three thousand miles from L.A.

And as one of the newest reporters in the Washington bureau, Keisha Russell was on the late shift. She was often tagged with chasing stories and pushing for the freshest details and developments.

“That sucks,” I said.

“Not as bad as what I heard happened to you today.”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I got downsized, Keish.”

“I’m so sorry, Jack.”

“Yeah, I know. Everybody is. Thanks.”

It should’ve been clear I was in the gun sights when they didn’t send me to D.C. with her two years earlier, but that was another story. A silence opened up between us and I tried to step on it.

“I’m going to pull out my novel and finish it,” I said. “I’ve got some savings and there’s got to be some equity in the house. I think I can go at least a year. I figure it’s now or never.”

“Yeah,” Keisha said with feigned enthusiasm. “You can do it.”

I knew she had found the manuscript one day when we were still together and had read it, never admitting it because if she did she would have to tell me what she thought. She wouldn’t have been able to lie about it.