Laura Lippman - Charm City

"But you have the real power, Dorie. You could bring this place to its knees. They couldn't put the paper out without you."

"Yet I'm still just a computer geek, right?" Apparently, she had not forgiven Tess's tactless opening line. "Lesson over. You're on your own now. Let me tell you one more thing-"

Tess looked up hopefully.

"If you spill soda or coffee on one of my keyboards, your life won't be worth living."

Although barely in his thirties, classical music critic Leslie Brainerd wore voluminous khakis hiked up to his sternum, belted so tightly they suggested an Empire ball gown. This effect was heightened by his long-fallen pectoral muscles, bobbling like voluptuous breasts in his knit polo shirt. Alone at his desk, he appeared to be listening to music on his headphones, which looked like a strange growth on his shiny bald head. But when Tess tapped him on the shoulder, he jumped with a violent start, awakened from a covert catnap.

"Small details are for small minds," he sniffed, once he understood why this strange woman had disturbed his sleep. "I have more important things on my mind than turning off this machine every night."

"I'm sure you do," Tess assured him, determined to ingratiate herself after her rough start with Dorie.

"Tuesday night was very busy for me," Brainerd continued fretfully. "I had to write on deadline . A most exquisite concert, featuring a young violinist." The name he mentioned meant nothing to Tess, and her blank look must have given this away.

"But you must know her! She's lovely ! To see her in a black velvet gown, slit to the femur, is to experience heaven. ‘ The curves of her body mirror the curves of the violin, creating an almost sexual tension between the performer and her instrument .' That's from my review."

She couldn't stop herself. "When Pinchas Zukerman was in town, I don't remember any details about his body."

"Oh, yes, my Zukerman piece. Another exceptional piece of deadline writing. I received quite a few compliments on that."

Good, Brainerd's hide was too thick to pierce, armored as it was with self-importance. Tess would bet that perhaps 5,000 of the Blight's 400,000 readers actually slogged through his reviews, but they were the right 5,000, the men and women likely to fraternize with the publisher and the top editors.

"So you left here about ten-thirty. Did you see anyone on your way out? Did you go straight home, or did you stop somewhere along the way?"

Brainerd looked confused. "Where would I go?"

"I don't know. A restaurant, a gas station, a bar. I'm trying to figure out if you can prove the time you left here, or if someone else can establish the time frame. The computer tells us when you filed, but because you didn't turn it off and the security system was down, there's no record of when you left the building. And your boss edited the piece from home, so he doesn't know when you left, either."

"I was not happy with Harold's changes. He never gives me enough space. Just slashes from the bottom, like some vandal, or that crazy Hungarian who hammered Michelangelo's Pièta . I asked him once if he thought Mozart could be edited, and he said, ‘He could if he wrote for me.'"

Tess mentally crossed Brainerd off the list of possible accomplices. It was obvious to her now that Leslie Brainerd was too egotistical to care about any story written by someone other than Leslie Brainerd. If he had stumbled into the Watergate burglary, he probably would have written about how sleek the Cubans looked in their black pants.

The others on Tess's list of those known to be in the building the evening of "unscheduled publication" were night-side workers who wouldn't arrive until 2 P.M. or later. She took a long lunch at Lexington Market, opting for an all-peanut meal: fresh roasted nuts for her main course, then brittle from Konstant Kandy for dessert. After a morning at the Beacon-Light , with its strange codes and conflicting agendas, the old market felt refreshingly real. You want an apple? Some bananas, maybe ? Apple meant apple; banana meant banana. No more, no less.

Back at the Blight a little after 2, she found custodian Irwin Spangler taking a cigarette break on the loading dock. He shook his head mournfully at all her questions. "The only thing I ever notice around Mr. Brainerd's desk is how many cups of coffee he's managed to spill in a day. Tuesday must have been a good day for him, because I don't remember needing too much time up there. I was off the floor by eleven."

Following the story's journey through the paper, Tess went to the composing room, on the third floor. Howard Nieman, the worker who had pasted the story in place and sent it on its way, was starting his shift. A stoop-shouldered man with thinning brown hair, he had a permanent squint from a lifetime of working with agate type.

"Didn't anything seem out of the ordinary to you that night?" Tess asked him, after introducing herself. "Wasn't there something about the story, or the way it arrived, that seemed unusual?"

"It fit and it didn't make the paper late. Those are the only things I really care about, miss."

It was a slow time for Nieman, the lull between the advance Sunday editions, which would be followed by the rest of the Sunday paper, and then the Saturday paper. He showed her how the copy came in, on shiny rolls of paper with gummy backs. The strips were sliced, then pasted on the pages. A camera shot a photograph of the page, and this photo was used to make the printing plate. Tess had known this once, albeit dimly.

"I'll tell you one funny thing," Nieman said. "This kind of trick would be difficult to pull off if the pagination system were in place. That's where they design all the pages by computer. They do some of them that way, but not page one, not yet. Ol' Five-Four is always slow to put out money for the new stuff."

"What are you going to do when they go to pagination company-wide? Would you take a buyout if they offered it, like they have at some other papers?"

He smiled with only half of his mouth. "Our contract calls for lifetime job security, so they'll retrain us for some monkey work around here. I'm fifty-two-too young to stop working, too old to learn another trade. I gotta stick it out."

Tess stopped next to an easel where the Real Estate section front was displayed. The standing "sig" across the top-the columnist's name, in this case-said Annie Heffner. The photograph showed someone with a full, glossy beard. She pointed this out to Nieman, who shrugged.

"We catch most of 'em. What's that thing about the forests and trees? Well, we're the tree guys."

Tess understood. Howard Nieman, like Dorie with her head full of computer commands, saw the paper differently than the average reader, or even the average reporter. His version was a modular collage, pieced together from strips of copy, photographs, and standing features. Tidal wetlands or basketball, what did he care? As long as he was off the floor on time and his paycheck came through for another week, he was a happy man.

And another unlikely accomplice.

The editors had given Tess a small, windowless office near the old, now unused presses. Tess consulted a list of Beacon-Light employees and sent an e-mail message to Lionel Mabry's secretary, asking to see the night rewrite, Chick Gorman, as soon as he arrived for work.

Tess had assumed Chick was a man, but the person who burst through her door minutes later was a small woman with close-cropped dark hair, the same reporter she had seen that morning. At first glance, the woman could have passed for a college intern. Then one noticed the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the shadow of a worry line between her eyebrows. Her poise finally gave her age away: absolute self-confidence can't be faked at 22.