Death of A High Maintenance Blonde (Jubilant Falls Series Book 5) (3 page)

Chapter 4: Addison

It must have been a rough night for everybody, I thought as I walked through the newsroom later that Friday morning. The whole staff looked like no one slept the night before.

Charisma’s car crash story was her excuse according to the time she filed the story. She rubbed her eyes as she spoke on the phone, getting updates on the victims. Knowing how her husband died, I hoped covering the crash didn’t cause her any anxiety. If it did, it wasn’t showing on her face.

I tried not to gag as I passed reporter Graham Kinnon. His shirt had a wet patch on the shoulder and he smelled of baby vomit; he had circles under his eyes as he sifted through today’s police reports for shorter, page three stories.

Like most fathers, he was smitten with his baby girl; despite his exhaustion, he had a smile on his face.

Marcus Henning, my city and county reporter, attributed his lack of sleep to a late-running West Coast baseball game on TV.

Only Dennis Herrick, my assistant editor, seemed to have slept at all. He whistled through his copy editing and page layout duties and we cheerfully and loudly hated him for it.

Despite the collective lack of sleep, the front page came together easily. Charisma’s crash story shared above-the-fold real estate with a preview of the new amusement company that would be providing the rides at next month’s county fair. Beneath that, Graham had a trial story and Marcus contributed a city council discussion of abandoned properties within Jubilant Falls that would be sold for taxes. Photographer Pat Robinette added a shot of the worst weed-infested property to the story.

I was able to put the vision of Jimmy Lyle’s body and the terror of my tornado dream behind me as the day progressed. It usually worked that way. I knew it was a door that would stay closed for a while; I would cope with it when the lock broke again and memories of that horrible day swung open once more.

My office phone rang. I slipped behind my desk and picked up the receiver. It was Assistant Police Chief Gary McGinnis.

“You ever watch those TV shows where they dig into those old cold cases?” he asked without saying hello.

“The ones where a case that’s sat cold for fifty years is suddenly solved within an hour by the handsome young detective who just started on the force a week ago?”

“Yeah, those.” There was sarcasm in his voice as Gary slurped his coffee. “We’ve got two cases we’re taking a fresh look at and maybe if one of your reporters would like to do a story on each of them, it might spark someone’s memory. We might get some new tips.”

“Let me guess: the kid beneath the bridge in the early eighties, and the dead state trooper a few years later.”

Gary murmured his assent as he took another slurp of coffee. “You got it,” he said, after he swallowed.

“You guys form a task force?”

“If that means Sheriff Roarke, my brothers Marvin and Harold, Mike Birger and me taking over a conference room to look over the old case notes, then yes, we’ve formed a task force.”

A significant number of the Jubilant Falls’ police force had the last name of McGinnis, including Assistant Chief Gary McGinnis, Chief Marvin McGinnis, Detective Harold McGinnis and Officer Jim McGinnis. Mike Birger was the city’s other detective. He’d landed in Jubilant Falls after a stint as an Air Force security police officer at nearby Symington Air Force Base. Thanks to budget cuts, a third detective position hadn’t been filled after the last guy, Mike Berrocco, retired.

“Let me see who’s up for it,” I said. “I may be able to farm it out to a somebody.”

“That new reporter of yours? The one with the French last name?”

“What about her?”

“I like her. She’s sharp—she’d be good at these stories, if no one else is available. I don’t know why, but I think I’ve seen her someplace before.”

“Really? I like the job she’s done so far, that’s for sure.” I could have confided Charisma’s past but I didn’t. If she wanted to share that, she could.

I liked Charisma. I liked her a lot. I went with my gut when I hired her, so much so I never checked her references. In an hour-long interview, I saw she had that sharp edge that told me she would go far. I got a vicarious thrill seeing former reporters go from the
Journal-Gazette
to bigger and better things. Charisma would be one of those whose byline I might see in the
New York Times
one day, I thought. Maybe I could help her get there.

It would just be a matter of getting her confidence back, healing from her wounds. She kept us all, including me, at a distance—it wasn’t going to be easy.

Gary brought me back to the conversation at hand. “Well, let me know what you want to do and who you’re assigning the story to,” he said. “It could be real helpful to us.”

“Sure.” Without either of us saying goodbye, our conversation was over.

I knew all too well the cases he was talking about.

The first murder happened about seven years after the tornado, after I graduated from college. I had just started my first job at another daily and contemplating a move back to Jubilant Falls when the
Journal-Gazette
ran the story about the body of a young man found in a creek beneath a county bridge; no one ever came forward to identify his tanned body or his killer. A few old-time firefighters and sheriff’s deputies were still around to talk to about the night that body was found. Police believed that the young man was killed somewhere else and dumped into the creek. No one ever knew his name.

Five years later, after I’d been at the J-G for a couple years, a state trooper was found lying beside his cruiser, the lights still flashing as it sat on the side of the highway, a single bullet in the back of his head.

In the days before dashboard cameras and in-car laptop computers, dispatchers last had contact with Trooper Robert Martz when he was initiating a 2 a.m. traffic stop on the state highway that then ran north and south through Jubilant Falls. He’d radioed in the plate on the car he was stopping, but either dispatch got the information wrong or the plate wasn’t on file. He also didn’t give a reason for the stop. When my father Walt Addison, the shift supervisor, found Martz’s body an hour later, there were only skidmarks dug into the road’s soft shoulder in front of the cruiser as his killer escaped into the night.

I revisited the story periodically, mainly because of the family connections between Bob Martz’s family, my father and me.

In my last story, his three children, now grown, were each photographed somberly holding a corner of a large sepia-toned family photograph from their childhood. The pull quote, printed in the white space above their heads was stark: “We’re still hoping for justice for Dad.”

Martz’s widow and kids moved away from Jubilant Falls after the youngest graduated from high school. It was just too damned hard to stay in a town where their father had died and justice hadn’t been served. I’d stayed in touch until the last story, but had no idea where to find them now.

Gary was right: reexamining the stories would bring phone calls to us and to the police. Folks always seemed to enjoy, in some perverse way, rehashing the gory details of past crimes. Somebody would call, asking a few questions—most of it not relevant to the story or asking salacious questions we would have no idea about.

People
, I thought to myself as Dennis handed me a proof of today’s front page.

Who knows what might come up? Maybe some justice this time?

*****

At the staff meeting later that afternoon, I presented the idea to my reporters. I’d found copies of the stories in the morgue and passed them around at the meeting.

“I just got a call from Gary McGinnis who said they were taking new looks at the cases and thought one of the stories might spark someone’s memory,” I said.

“I’d love to look into these,” Charisma said. She didn’t look up as she perused the yellowing copy of the paper with Robert Martz’s murder screaming across the front page: TROOPER FOUND SHOT.

“Chief G mentioned these to me this morning,” Graham said. “I told him I didn’t think I could do a whole lot right now until Gwennie starts sleeping through the night. Besides, I’ve got a couple trials coming up that will keep me pretty tied up for the next couple weeks.”

“The Jessop trial?” Dennis asked, making notes. “The woman who is suing the county commissioners for unfair termination?”

“Yes. I’ve also got that school bus driver picked up on DUI charges. If Charisma wants these cold cases, she can have at it. It won’t hurt my feelings at all,” Graham said.

Marcus nodded in agreement. “Our son Andrew is coming home on leave from the air force pretty soon. My wife wants me to take some time off while he’s here.”

Charisma looked up at me with a gleam in her eye, the first I’d seen since she’d started here.

“These stories would help me learn about the town, maybe learn a little history…” Charisma practically begged to cover these stories.

“Go for it,” I said. There was a knock on the door; my publisher Earlene Whitelaw poked her head into the office.

“Hi ya’ll! You havin’ a staff meetin’?”

My jaw clenched. Ever since Earlene had taken over the publisher’s chair from her father, J. Watterson Whitelaw, it had been a string of bad ideas born from a woman who had no concept of how to run a newspaper.

In a time when newspaper readership was sinking like a rock and revenue harder and harder to come by, she’d increased the number of special sections advertising had to sell—and editorial had to fill with stories—often on short notice.

Large or small, every newspaper has a yearly plan of special sections. Bridal sections, home improvement sections, tax season, car care, a preview of the county fair and a fair review that ran pictures of champions and lists of results were some of the standard sections we did each year, in addition to what was known in the newspaper business as the “progress edition,” which highlighted particular themes or businesses in the community.

Earlene took it to extreme.

Since Earlene had been here, she’d pushed all kinds of moronic ideas—a celebration of barbeque when there were no BBQ joints in town, and the crowning humiliation, an edition printed with the fold on the right hand side of the paper—essentially upside down—for Left Hander’s Day, highlighted by a rambling story she wrote about the daily struggles
(really?)
she and other left-handers faced. Of course, she wouldn’t let me edit that piece of shit for clarity or content.

I took phone calls all day about that one, including one from Gary McGinnis who was laughing so hard he could hardly speak.

It was no wonder our most consistent advertisers were beginning to feel tapped out after so many requests to advertise—and embarrassed about the advertising product their name was often attached to.

As a result, too, the long-stable advertising sales staff began to turn over on such a regular basis there was talk a revolving door should be installed. We’d been through three advertising directors since Earlene took over. The position was currently vacant; Jane, the department secretary, told Dennis that Earlene’s bizarre demands were the reason for the volatility.

When I should have been improving the quality of the journalism in our paper, I was scanning the calendar for made-up holidays, like Celebrate Cabbage Day to head off Earlene’s crazy ideas. I staved off International Popcorn Day with a couple wire stories on the food page; I talked her out of a front-page story on National Donut Day that involved members of the police force.

A few of these goofy calendar recognitions did give us ideas for stories, but they never seemed to spark interest for her. A series on bullying was first shot down, but we went ahead with it anyway. When it won a state Associated Press award, Earlene wouldn’t speak to me for days.

Over the last few week’s she’d started showing up at my Monday afternoon staff meetings, much to the staff’s chagrin.

“Hi, Earlene,” I said slowly. “Come on in.”

Marcus Henning rolled his eyes at Dennis as Earlene, nearly six feet tall in her turquoise stilettos, with a matching silk flower in her sky-high Miss Texas hair, sat down beside him, hiking her skirt as she did so. Dennis and Charisma bit their lips, hiding their smirks. Only Graham, with all the exhaustion of a new parent, didn’t react.

The luckiest member of the staff was photographer Pat Robinette, who had a dental appointment, and was missing this show. At that moment, I wished I were having a root canal, too.

“So what’s up?” I asked.

“So next Thursday is National Newspaper Day,” she began, twisting her chunky turquoise necklace with her long manicured fingers.

Oh Jesus, how did I miss that?
I wondered.

“And I had this
wonderful
idea of doing a front page on the process of putting together a newspaper, starting from when the truck pulls up in back with the big rolls of paper to what ya’ll do in the newsroom and what advertising does, right to the end when the paper hits the street.”

“Hmmm,” I said. This might not be a bad idea, depending, of course, on how it was presented. One of my chief complaints about my readers—and my publisher— was how little they really knew about the news business. This could be, as they say, a teachable moment. “So how would the story run?”

“Well, I would write the story, of course…”

Oh shit.

“And I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if it was told from a unique perspective? You know, something different?”

“Like what?” I tried to sound neutral as my stomach churned.

“From the viewpoint of one of the mice that I happened to see down in the press room.”

My reporter’s heads snapped up and their eyes got big, but no one spoke.

I swallowed. “Earlene, I think—”

“I knew you’d love it! I’ve got some ideas for photos. Let’s talk about it later this afternoon, OK?” She stood up, smoothed her skirt, and left, not quite closing the door as she exited.

I waited to speak until I heard her stilettos no longer clicking down the stairs.