J. Wachowski - In Plain View

Feet came crunching through the grass.

I jumped back from the window, heart pounding. This place made me more nervous than it should have.

“Strike out,” Ainsley called in his version of a stage whisper. “The super is only around in the evenings, according to the neighbor. What are you doing?”

“Looking.”

“Looking for what?”

“Don’t know until I see it.”

Ainsley came alongside me to look.

Tom Jost kept a simple studio apartment, furnished in late-century garage sale-one folding chair, one Formica table, one lumpy recliner. The place was damn tidy. His small single bed was made up with brown blankets and military care. White walls. No posters. No art. The only personal item I could see was a photo of a couple in a paper frame, the kind you pay five bucks for after you get off a ride at the fair. I’d seen several of Jenny and her mother around the house.

“Go get my camera case from the van, would you?”

“Would that be legal?”

“Not for pictures, Mr. Worrywart. I want the telephoto.”

It worked better than I expected. With my camera against the door and a polarizing filter, I could read the faces in Tom’s photo. It took a second before I recognized her. Fairy-tale Rachel looked quite a bit different wearing modern dress with her hair down.

“Got him. This is our Tom, all right.”

“Are you done yet?” Ainsley was doing the college boy’s version of furtive: hands sunk deep in his pockets, head bobbing, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon as he glanced back and forth. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Wait. Yes! ”

“What?” Ainsley tried to peek around my shoulder.

Tom had hung a bag of dry cleaning from the top of a door. Focusing on the suit, I caught a glimpse of the patches on what seemed to be a uniform. “Our boy was a public servant.”

“Police?”

“Nope. Firefighter.”

“So those guys at the tree yesterday…”

“Knew him.” Some instinct told me to scan the surroundings again. That crawly feeling someone was watching tiptoed up my spine. “Farmer Lowe hinted as much. Good news for us, College.”

“What?”

A shadow passed in front of the super’s apartment window. I gave Ainsley a happy, distracting shot to the biceps, urging him to walk toward the van. “It means he’s got a decent head-shot on record somewhere.”

“Right! But how do we get it?”

We climbed in the van and I used my elbow to casually trigger the automatic locks. “I’ll bet my new best friend at the Clarion might be able to help. Mr. Melton Shotter.”

Ainsley’s face bloomed with relief as he started the engine. “Can you call from the van? There’s a DQ right around the corner and I’m dying for lunch.”

“I watched you eat three bagels in the staff meeting.”

“They were minis,” he said indignantly.

“Fine. You eat; I’ll call.” Oh, to live the metabolism of a college kid again. I watched the building as we pulled out. Even though I couldn’t see them, I was sure someone was watching. “Get us out of here.”

“With pleasure.”

By the time Ainsley’d scored his Dairy Queen happy meal-with a large diet pop for me-we were miles from Tom Jost’s place and I was deep into the newspaper’s phone system trying to hook up with a real, live Melton.

“ Clarion. Metro desk.”

“Melton, my friend. You rolled over on me.”

“Umm…who is this?”

“You’re funny.” My day had not been very productive so far. Easy enough to punch a little Irish temper into the words. “This is Maddy O’Hara, Melton. Sheriff Curzon was at the station before I was this morning.”

“Uh-sorry about that.”

“What’d you do, draw him a map after you gave him my name? Whatever happened to protecting a source, Melton?”

“I figured you, well-” He squirmed. “I’m sorry, all right?”

“Yeah sure, because I got a great idea how you can make it up to me, Melton. I need some research help.”

“What kind of research?”

“Easy stuff. Everything you can find on a guy named Tom Jost-where he went to high school, adoption records, if he had a girlfriend, what he did on weekends besides whack off-”

Ainsley coughed his chocolate shake all over the steering wheel.

“It’s that dead Mennonite!” Melton’s lightbulb blinked on. “You got an ID?”

“Maybe. We think the guy was a public servant, a firefighter.”

“No way,” he said with glee. Salacious mysteries are meat and potatoes to reporters. “Where? What town?”

“Not sure. His apartment’s in Warrenville. One thing, Melton, everything stays out of the paper until after I air on Wednesday.” I heard a grumble. “Did I mention there’s a possibility of credit in this for you? National, on-air credit. ‘Research by.’ Look mighty sweet on your resume. Not that you deserve it after ratting me out to Curzon like that.”

“All right,” he whined. “Fine. I’ll try.”

“Great. Tomorrow morning good for you?”

“Jee-zus. Tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“Don’t go getting religious on me yet, Melton. The fun’s just getting started.”

We agreed on an early afternoon deadline before he hung up.

Things were getting done. I was feeling good. “Next item on the agenda: expert head.”

“Whaaat?”

Without looking up from my notes, I continued, “Get your mind out of the gutter, College. We need a specialist. A doctor. A psychologist. Someone we can get to say ‘autoerotic asphyxiation’ fast enough to work into a ten-second promo head-shot. That’s an expert head.”

“Right.” He sounded embarrassed.

The parking lot of the DQ was filling up. A couple of teenagers in a rusty Volvo circled for the third time, hungry for our parking place.

“Use your phone. Try the biggest hospital in the area. I’ll try the community college.”

Ainsley took his phone in one hand, chocolate shake in the other, and bounced his thigh against the steering wheel to the beat of oldies rock, while I entered my own phone purgatory. Pressing. Holding. Pressing. With my free hand, I dug through both gear bags and realized I was low on important stuff.

“You got any aspirin?” I asked.

College nodded toward the glove compartment. “We’ve got our choice,” he reported between phone-mail-to-live-human maneuvering. “Do we want an expert on suicide, an expert on sexual deviance or someone who studies Amish psychology?”

No question. “Sexual deviance.”

“Okay.” More conferring, then he says, “Guy’s out of town and won’t be back for a week.”

“Suicide?” I asked, hopefully.

“…Uh, that guy can only be reached on Mondays and Wednesdays. But she’d be happy to leave a message with the service,” Ainsley added.

“Shit.” No matter how much I tried to turn this into something that would look like ratings-happy TV, it seemed the Amish were my destiny. The sad thing was I found it pretty intriguing. “Amish psychology is our winner. But ask her to leave a message for the suicide guy, to be safe.”

After three and a half more minutes of listening to him try to pin down an appointment, I held out my hand. “Gimme the phone.”

“What?” he complained. “She keeps asking me to wait.”

The standard whiney operator came on the line. “Who you holding for?”

“This is Maddy O’Hara from WWST and I’m trying to reach the doctor for a television news interview.”

“An interview? On TV?”

“That’s right. We’d like to use the doctor in an investigative report we’re doing on a local public suicide.” I hit that detail hard. Nothing wins over a gatekeeper like a juicy nugget of gossip. “Unfortunately, I’m having trouble getting through to someone who can schedule us. Can you help?”