Laura Lippman - Charm City

It was Friday morning, and metro editor Marvin Hailey was leading Tess through the newsroom, which looked more like an insurance office gone to seed. Scurrying behind the reluctant Hailey, Tess tried to keep tabs on where she was going in this maze of cubicles, dented metal filing cabinets, and ancient computers rigged with various accessories to make them slightly less lethal to the users and their wrists. Cardboard file boxes were stacked around some desks, creating makeshift walls, while old newspapers rose toward the ceiling in shaky yellowing towers. Recycling was apparently too avant-garde for the staid Beacon-Light .

"It looks like you're running out of space," Tess said, trying to make conversation with the unsmiling editor.

"We are," Hailey said, glancing over his shoulder as if acknowledging even this obvious fact was fraught with risk.

"Any chance of the whole operation moving out to the 'burbs? I know you're already printing the paper out there."

"We had to have new presses, and it made sense for delivery purposes to be outside the Beltway. But the other departments will remain here until Five-uh, Pfieffer-can get a good price for the property."

"Forever, in other words."

Hailey grunted, a safely neutral noise.

It was 9 A.M., a rare quiet moment in the cycle of an all-day newspaper. Within an hour, the skeleton crew of overnight editors would put to bed the "evening" paper, a publication identical to the morning paper except in layout and the updates on predawn carnage provided by a lone police reporter. Most of the other reporters had yet to arrive, with the exception of a dark-haired woman with her feet propped on an open desk drawer, reading the morning paper while she listened to a police scanner. A phone rang on the city desk, but no one was there to answer it.

"So this is where you make the magic happen," Tess said.

Marvin Hailey lunged for the still ringing phone, succeeding only in knocking over an old mug of coffee. Tess watched him try to stem the milky-brown spill with wadded-up newspapers, only to spread the puddle over more of the desk top. Such a dry husk of a man-shoulders speckled with dandruff, lips whitish and cracked from constant, nervous licking. He looked as if he might break up and blow away in a strong breeze.

"Oh, hell," he sighed. The newspaper had finally absorbed the coffee, only to leave his hands black with ink. Resignedly, he tossed the crumpled sheets into a nearby trash can, wiped his palms on his pilled trousers, and sat down at his computer.

"We've got you all set up on our system. To sign on, you hit this button and type in MONAGHAN," he said, doing just that. Even his typing had a jumpy, paranoid rhythm, as if he expected someone to creep up behind him and find fault in whatever he did. "Now the computer wants a six-letter password. You want me to pick something out for you? It's not as if you'll need a secret one."

"That's okay, I'll do it." Tess slid the keyboard away from Hailey and tapped in the first six-letter word that came to mind: E-S-S-K-A-Y, which showed up on the computer only as a series of asterisks. Who knew what secrets she might want to keep as this progressed? "Now what?"

"Well, I assume you're going to start interviewing people. I drew up a list of people we know were here that night. Editors, reporters, custodial staff, the printer who set the bogus-um, unofficial-story. You should be able to get to most of them today, except for Feeney and Ruiz. They flew to Georgia yesterday, aren't expected back until late tonight."

" Georgia? For the Wink story?"

"I guess so, but no one's informed me officially." Hailey allowed himself a small, bitter smile. "This is so hot only Colleen, Mabry, and Sterling are in the loop. I guess I'll find out when the Sunday paper comes out, like everyone else in Baltimore."

"Don't be so bitter, Marv. They haven't clued me in, either, and I'm the sports editor. The story came out of my department, don't forget that." A grinning, square-jawed man appeared out of the warren of desks and cubicles to offer his arm to Tess, which she declined to take. "Guy Whitman. I'm here to lead you to the system manager, who will explain what happened electronically Tuesday night. The computers are part of my province."

"What do computers have to do with the sports department?" Tess asked, as she began following him along a new path through the newsroom labyrinth.

"I'm also in charge of Beacon-Light 2000, a task force set up to examine the paper's information services, what we'll need to go into the twenty-first century."

"Aren't newspapers already in the information services business?"

Guy looked as if he wanted to pat her on the head. He was handsome, in a fluffy-hair kind of way rare in a newspaper editor. And didn't he know it . Too bad his taste in ties appeared to be terminally whimsical. Tess tried not to make a sour face at the dancing lacrosse sticks.

"You sound like everyone else around here, Theresa. Haven't you noticed the times, they are a-changing? You can read virtually every major metropolitan newspaper on the World Wide Web. The Washington Post has its own on-line service. But the Beacon-Light , one of the last family-owned papers in the country, has only started beta-testing its Web site, and they're doing it on the cheap. They think they can continue to work primarily in paper." He spat out the last word as if it were something caught in his teeth.

"Well, paper is awfully handy for taking on a bus, or sharing at the breakfast table. By the way, my grandmother on my mother's side is the only person who gets away with calling me Theresa."

"I hope you're not one of those types who's still hot for hot type, Theresa." Whitman didn't seem to be deliberately ignoring her, he had just lost the habit of listening to any voice other than his own. "Dreaming of pneumatic tubes-don't tell me that's not Freudian. But things do change, and usually for the better, I think, although that's not always a popular opinion these days. Do you think football should be played in leather helmets? Should we use carrier pigeons to cover breaking events? Would you have preferred to come here today via streetcar? You're young, you're suppose to embrace the future, while old farts like myself-" he paused here, in case she wanted to object to his characterization of himself. "Anyway, you make a lovely Luddite."

For someone who's so gung ho about the future, Guy Whitman was sure behind the times when it came to the current thinking on what constitutes sexual harassment . Tess thought about reprimanding him, but he had ducked through a narrow space between two plastic dividers covered with soiled, once-blue fabric-the systems manager's "office."

Behind the dingy dividers, all was order-a severe, meticulous order. The metal cabinets shone, as did the desk, giving the alcove the high-tech, unused look of an office in an Ikea catalog. With the exception of a Georgia O'Keefe wall calendar and one Post-It note on the computer terminal, there was not a single scrap of paper in this office. Not even a newspaper, Tess noticed.

"So, where's the computer geek who presides over this electronic kingdom?" she asked Whitman.

A scratchy female voice came from somewhere around their ankles. "The geek is under her desk, unplugging a laptop whose batteries she was recharging because the prima donna reporter who had it last couldn't be bothered with such a mundane task."

A plump woman in her late thirties crawled out and stood up, brushing off her jeans. Of medium height, with flyaway brown hair that had long ago surrendered to a nest of cowlicks, she was as soft and disarrayed as her office was hard and sleek.

Tess held out her hand. "Tess Monaghan, vicious purveyor of stereotypes."