I Saw Your Profile (3 page)

Chapter
Three

T
he
newsroom at
the Philadelphia Press Herald was buzzing when Arianna walked into the office.
The wires were reporting that two suspects had been arrested in the sniper
shootings that had left ten people dead and three wounded during a twenty-one
day rampage across Maryland, Virginia, and D.C.

    
Almost as important
was the news they were black.

    
“Singleton. I need you
over here!” Larry Parsons was barking orders from the city desk, the engine
that ran the newsroom. “We need a reaction story to the sniper arrests. I want
you to take the race angle. A lot of people are going to question these arrests
because the suspects are black. No one has ever heard of black serial killers.
I need you to talk to people in the black community and see what they are
saying.”

     
Arianna hated it
when her white editors made references to the black community as if they all
lived in the same neighborhood and shared the same thoughts.

    
Especially Larry. She
and the other black reporters called him Vanilla Ice. He grew up near the
Richard Allen housing project in
North Philadelphia and had a few
black friends so he thought he was a homeboy. Never mind that he lived in a
four hundred thousand dollar house in Chestnut Hill and hadn’t had a black
friend since high school.

     
And the fact
that he screwed half the female staff didn’t endear him to her.

    
She’d been at the
Press Herald for a year and learned all his dirt in her first month. There are
no secrets in newsrooms.

    
“Do you have any
specific questions you’d like me to ask the Negroes, Larry? Or is this the
garden-variety man-on-the-street where we just ask them how they feel that one
of their own has been accused of committing these heinous crimes?”

    
“For Christ sakes
Singleton, you’re a veteran. I shouldn’t have to tell you what to ask.”

    
That’s never stopped an editor before.

    
She was thinking about
her days at the Hartford Sentinel in Connecticut. She’d written award-winning
investigative pieces, but her editors still treated her like an intern. Arianna
couldn’t get out of New England fast enough. She was drawn to the Mid-Atlantic
by the prospect of practicing quality journalism and the lure of life in a big
city.

     
The Sentinel had
been like a plantation. The Press Herald wasn’t much different, but at least
her masters gave her respect and had high expectations - and she lived up to
them.

     
Larry was loud,
surly and had the social skills of a barstool drunk. He got on her nerves, but
she respected his news judgment and the fact that he trusted hers.

    
“Are we talking A1 or
inside?”

    
She wanted A1. She
didn’t want her byline buried inside with international stories nobody read.

    
“Not sure yet, but
you’ve got twenty inches. Take a photographer with you.”

    
Though she gave him a
hard time, Larry was right. This story was going to be the talking news of the
day in black barbershops, hair salons and soul food restaurants.

    
She walked to the
photo department and asked a photographer to meet her at Big George’s
Stop-n-Dine. She was sure to find people there talking about the snipers over
their grits and eggs.

    
On her way outside,
she ran into Joyce Daniels, the sister who covered city hall.

    
“Do you believe this
shit? The snipers are bruthas. I just left city hall and it’s all everybody is
talking about.”
 

    
“The alleged snipers
are bruthas, Joyce. Alleged.”

    
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m
not writing a story here, Ari. Do you think they did it?”

    
“How do I know? I only
know that AP is reporting they’ve been arrested. But I gotta admit, I never
would’ve thought that whoever did it would be black.”

    
“Where you headed?”

     
“Big George’s. I
gotta go find people who look like you and me, but who don’t write for
newspapers to say they can’t believe it either.”

     
Joyce smirked.
“The black reax story, huh? I should’ve known. It’s too bad you can’t just
quote me and the rest of the black staff here and save yourself a trip.”

    
“Remember. We don’t
all think alike.”

    
“You know you’re
preaching to the choir on that one, but I dare you to find one black person who
says, ‘Yeah, I knew it was a brutha all along.’”

     
It was Arianna’s
turn to laugh. “Girl you are a trip. I gotta go. I’ve got a photog meeting me
over there and I need to grab a cup of java first. We wouldn’t want to leave
the white boy alone in a room full of colored folks. You know how they are.
It’s okay for us to be the fly in the buttermilk, but let one of them be the
lone marshmallow in the hot chocolate and they’ll find any excuse to escape.”

    
They laughed together.

    
Arianna was still
smiling as she walked to Baltimore Avenue where her car was parked.

 
    
The Press Herald was
in West Philadelphia in the University City district, home to the University of
Pennsylvania and other colleges
,
galleries and museums. When she
could, Arianna liked to take her lunch breaks at the museums. Sometimes, she
hopped on a trolley and went to Center City, Philadelphia’s downtown business
district, and ate lunch there.

 
    
She knew that day
would be like many others when an assignment meant she’d be eating lunch on the
run, if at all.

Jill Scott was singing about
collard greens, black-eyed peas and biscuits when Arianna started the engine of
her gold Toyota Camry. She popped out the CD and turned the radio to
WHAT and listened to callers sound off about the
weird
black man and his Jamaican teenage sidekick accused of killing innocent people
for sport
.

     
“I was sure it
was going to be some crazy, red-neck white guy. Black people don’t go around
shooting total strangers for no reason,” said a man with a Southern accent.

    
She
drove to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Walnut Street and got her
usual, a large hazelnut coffee. When she got back in the car, she turned to
WURD, the other AM station with black talk shows, and listened to more of the
same as she made her way towards South Fifty-Second Street to Big George’s.

     
She planned to
use the information from the radio shows in her story. She started writing the
lead in her head based on what she expected she’d find during her reporting the
rest of the day.

     
On
the airwaves, in cyberspace, restaurants, barbershops, and gyms, black
Philadelphians expressed shock yesterday that the two men arrested in the
sniper shootings look like them.

     
She spent all
morning and most of the afternoon reporting before going back to the office.
Despite the circumstances, spending the day surrounded by black people was a
refreshing change from her usual workday.

    
As she drove around
the city, Arianna kept thinking about how much it reminded her of New York,
except on a smaller scale. New York was only a two-hour drive from where she
lived in Connecticut and she spent a lot of weekends there hanging out with
friends who had made their escape to the big city.

Philadelphia even
had its own version of Greenwich Village on South Street, one of her favorite
hang outs with its
craft shops, coffee bars
and ethnic restaurants.

 
    
Since making an escape
of her own, she had less reason to venture to the Big Apple.

     
When she got
back to her office, Larry had an answer about where her story was going to
play.

     
“Singleton. I’m
pitching your story for A1,” he barked as she passed the city desk on the way
to her cubicle.

    
“Great. I’ll send you
a budget.”

     
She logged on to
her computer, wrote the lead she created in her head, and sent it
electronically to Larry’s queue along with an estimated filing time of five.
That gave her two and half hours to write, way more than she needed.

    
At three-thirty, Larry
started getting antsy.

    
“Singleton. How’s that
story coming?” he said, shouting from across the room. He was preparing for the
afternoon news meeting and needed details.

    
“I sent you a budget
line. It’ll be filed by the time you get out of your meeting. I’m just waiting
on one phone call.”

 
    
A criminal profiler
was going to call and talk about how the sniper was supposed to be an angry
white man who felt slighted or was desperate for respect and attention. She
wanted at least one voice of authority in her story.

     
Apparently,
Larry wasn’t satisfied with her answer. He walked to her desk and peered over
her shoulder.
 
Arianna swiveled her
chair around so she was facing him, blocking her computer screen with her head.

     
“You know how I
hate that, Larry. What exactly is it that you want to know? Just ask.”

     
“Did you get any
really good quotes? I’m thinking about stripping the story across the bottom
with mug shots of the people you talked to.”

 
    
“I have lots of people
saying they don’t believe they got the right guys. They used words like
rednecks, crazy white supremacists, and skinheads. Is that sexy enough for
you?”

 
    
The phone rang.

    
“I’ve got to take
this,” she said. “It’s the call I’ve been waiting for.”

    
“Go ahead. I’ve got to
get to the meeting. I’m sure the story will be fine.”

    
“Press Herald. Arianna
Singleton.”

     
“Ms. Singleton.
You’re a difficult lady to reach. This is Detective Mitchell of the Los Angeles
Police Department. Do you have a few moments?”

    
“I’m afraid I don’t.
I’m on deadline right now,” she said, her right leg beginning to shake.

    
“Is there a better time
for me to call you?”

    
“Later tonight. In the
meantime, can you tell me what this is regarding?”

     
“A case we’re
working on.”

 
    
“Why do you need to
talk to me?”

     
“I can explain
everything to you when you have more time to talk.”

    
“I have to go now,
detective.”

    
“All right, Ms.
Singleton. I’ll speak with you later this evening.”

    
Why the hell don’t we have caller ID in this damn place?

    
The next call was from
the criminal profiler. She filed her story with a note that she had to leave
early and if Larry had any questions to call her cell phone.

    
She knew he wouldn’t.
He never did.

    
Before
heading home, Arianna made a run to Staples.

The cashier put an eighty-gigabyte hard drive in a bag. “Did you
find everything you’re looking for?”

    
“Yes,
thank you.” Arianna handed her an American Express card.

    
That night, after the
kids were asleep, she planned to switch hard drives.

    
Arianna
was a packrat. She never threw away or deleted anything. She saved all the
emails she thought were important or had sentimental value. Some of those
emails could get her into trouble. Even if she deleted them, she knew there
were ways to retrieve them. She didn’t want to take that chance.

    
As
she pulled out of the store parking lot, she grabbed her cell phone from the
cup holder and spoke Janelle’s name into the receiver. After three rings,
Janelle answered.

   
“I was
wondering when you would get around to calling me. I take it you heard from
Detective Mitchell?”