Deadline Man

The plaza and street are busy with the lunch crowd. Men in suits with places to go. Young women in skirts and heels with life in their eyes. Tourists studying maps of downtown and carrying Nordstrom bags. Badly dressed Seattle kids in hoodies who think they invented the unbathed, stubble look. Lots of young software engineer-types with windbreakers and computer bags over their shoulders. The usual panhandlers and assorted street rats. Traffic is moving easily along Fourth and every few seconds a green-and-yellow King Metro or blue-and-white Sound Transit bus roars by. Even so, the air smells like it must have smelled the

first day the world cooled down and became paradise. I re-crimp the knot of my tie and pull the notebook out of my inside suit pocket. My shoulder still aches where the short-haired woman hit me and I start to rub it when I hear the faintest whistling sound.

The explosion is close, a single sharp boom, concussing and echoing between the skyscrapers. I fall to the plaza concrete and cover my head, a consequence of long-ago training. The concrete is cold and that only makes my heart hammer harder. When I look up, most people are just standing there paralyzed, locked in the second of the detonation, dumb, stunned looks on their faces. I think, of course, terrorism. I stay down, recalling reading how there’s often a follow-up car bomb to kill the rescuers. Another part of me thinks: this is a great story.

The street is silent for a few seconds, and I can’t smell any evidence of an explosion. None of the windows are shattered. There’s no blood. As I rise to my feet, people start talking and yelling, moving toward the street. A car alarm erupts. One scream, seismic in its intensity, then a second. Different screamers. I follow the noise and see the wrecked hood of a new black Toyota Camry. The front tires are flat. It’s sitting behind a bus on the curb lane, where the building angles away from the plaza and sits hard against the sidewalk. The Toyota’s driver is one of the people screaming. Then I see what’s left of the body cradled in the collapsed hood of the car. My legs walk toward it, my body drunk on adrenaline. I am amazed by the lack of blood on the corpse. It lies face up. That makes it easy to see that what’s left of the man on the Toyota is encased in a sleek black suit and a purple shirt, buttoned at the collar.

Chapter Two

After the anecdotal lede comes what’s called the nut graf, the nutshell paragraph that will summarize the complicated story and put it in a larger, more compelling context for readers. It takes special skill to write an effective nut graf. Editors like nut grafs and I’m good at them. But for my story I’ll pass on it for now.

I wait to be interviewed by the police. The sidewalk around the Toyota has been cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. They wrap it around the trunks of the trees lining the street. It looks festive. The leaves are starting to turn. The body itself is hidden behind a blue tarp. People leave the plaza to return to work, their lunches ruined. Some are crying. Traffic is awful because of all the police and fire vehicles, and horns echo off the buildings. Seagull cries echo, too, as if they’re really vultures. I sit on a cold concrete cube of plaza ornament and try to make notes about my interview with Troy. Not to be a heartless bastard, but there’s still a column to write. One of the cops recognizes me.

“Hey, you’re the columnist,” the plainclothesman says. “I like your stuff,” he adds. “I never used to look at the business pages before.”

He introduces himself as Sergeant Mazolli. “One Z,” he says. Journalists should never stereotype, but he looks like the guy who’s owned your favorite Italian restaurant for years: portly, fleshy-faced, stubby cigars for eyebrows and an expression that’s friendly as long as you don’t push it. I put my notebook away. Mazolli wants to discuss high finance. I stare toward the Toyota. I remember the view off Troy Hardesty’s boastful balcony, dizzy, free-fall, devil nightmare, all the way down to the people-ants along Fourth Avenue. What would you think about on the way down? Would you have enough time to wonder if you’d made a big mistake? Or would it just be one long terror ride to the surface?

“Take the Chinese,” Mazolli says. “They’re loving these wars. We spend the blood and treasure, and they just keep racking up our debt. What is it? Six-hundred billion a year we borrow from them? And all so we could buy their junk.” I nod knowingly. He finally gets down to business.

My hands are shaking. I may or may not have been the last person to see Troy Hardesty alive. Mazolli doesn’t say. Something keeps me from wanting to know. So we go through his questions. No, Troy didn’t seem despondent when we had talked. No, he didn’t say anything about wanting to take a dive off an office building onto the product of the world’s largest automaker. I don’t know much about Troy’s private life. His wife’s name is Melissa and he lives on Mercer Island; I’ve never been to the house. He was a wealthy, influential guy who liked to talk and occasionally he had good information. It wouldn’t be the first time money couldn’t buy happiness. Hell, maybe he got too close to the railing and slipped. Mazolli wants to know what we talked about but when I tell him he grows bored. “I lost a ton in Olympic stock,” he grouses. I wish my hands would stop shaking. Mazolli confers in whispers with another cop and tells me I can go.

I don’t get back to the newspaper until nearly three. Now I’m starting to get anxious about the Sunday column, due in twenty-two hours. I can write fast and I never freeze. An editor once nicknamed me “the deadline man” for my poise under pressure. But I still need to gather material and critical time has been lost. Some of the calls I need to make are to New York, where it’s nearly six p.m.

***

The Free Press Building is an art-deco jewel close by the downtown shopping district. If I look outside the window by my desk I can see the blue, vertical Nordstrom sign. It consists of a fourteen-story tower and a five-story addition that mostly holds the presses. The newspaper building was finished in 1931 and has been lovingly preserved, right down to a side door that still says “newsboys only.” The main entrance has an eagle, wings spread, and elaborate scrollwork carved into the limestone. Large letters proclaim THE SEATTLE FREE PRESS, and below them is carved DEDICATED TO THE PUBLIC TRUST. A single flagpole hangs out to the street from above the eagle, with the American flag slapping languidly in the October breeze. There’s scrollwork, filigree, and other designs above and below the windows, and carved figures inset at the building’s corners. One is winged Mercury, another a 1930s working man, yet another vaguely resembles one of the panhandlers down by my place in Pioneer Square. More stern-visaged eagles roost close to the top, poised to fly, then, above them, towering statues emerge from the limestone as the building reaches the roof. These are robed figures: wisdom, truth, philosophy? Obviously they are not most editors. The building attests to a time when the press had great power. Now the company leases much of the building to software firms, game developers, and lawyers.

I walk in the grand entrance, through one of the six brass doors, across the polished marble floor. The lobby was once busy with people placing classified ads. Now it’s nearly empty, few people there to see the front pages from 100 years of the Free Press, displays holding eight Pulitzer Prizes, and portraits of its publishers. Prominent is the painting of Maggie Forrest Sterling. She looks out on the lobby, frozen at age fifty, at the height of her powers. No matter that she was the grand-daughter of the man who started the paper—she had begun in the newsroom covering cops. I had always imagined her as one of the wise-cracking, tough-as-nails girl reporters from old movies. She had still seemed that way when I knew her, a young eighty, opinionated sweet vinegar. She had liked my column and protected me from businesses that didn’t care for my take on their troubles. Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Microsoft, Amazon.com—I don’t always make friends. She had died in her top-floor office three years ago. It had been a Friday the thirteenth. I see a very alive publisher near the elevator bank. James Sterling looks like a handsome intellectual, with tortoise-shell glasses, reddish brown hair and beard, and a narrow mouth. He’s friendly and has carried on the family traditions with the paper and I don’t quite trust him. With him are two men in expensive suits. They look anonymously like bankers or lawyers. Throw them into a convention of either and you’d never pick them back out. I hang back at the security console and let them take the first elevator. A man I knew just dived off a skyscraper. He fell right in front of me. My shoes don’t quite connect to the floor and I have a cosmic sinus headache. In a moment, I walk on and push the button for the fifth floor. It takes a moment before I realize someone else is in the car: Karl Zimmer, the head of maintenance. He’s a tall, humorless man with an old-fashioned crew cut gone white and a raw-boned face so pale it looks like concrete. He’s worked here as long as anyone can remember. I say hello. He grunts. Melinda Stewart jokes that he’s a serial killer.

The main newsroom of the Seattle Free Press takes up the entire fifth floor of the tower part of the building. When I first started here, it was a low-ceilinged clutter of metal desks and cigarette smoke. I had missed the era of typewriters by just a few years, and IBM Selectrics languished in stacks inside closets. By the time I came back to the paper a few years ago, the ceiling had been opened up, low carpet-wall cubicles had replaced the metal desks, and color-coordinated banners hung over the departments: METRO, NATIONAL, COPY DESK, DESIGN, and more.

Still, you would never mistake it for an insurance office. The cubicles are inevitably cluttered with files, piles of old newspapers and precariously stacked cardboard boxes to hold the overflow from the cubicle file drawers from the Herman Miller designers. Here and there, old timers have thin metal pica poles sticking out of pencil cups—I still have mine, with my name etched in it. From the remains of the old newsroom: waist-high wood cabinets to hold bound editions of various sections or the whole newspaper, and, especially around the cluster of copy editors, shelves contain every kind of reference book. Four large blue recycling containers further destroy the pristine intentions, looking as if they had just been wheeled in from the alley. A Free Press newsstand sits beside the metro desk, the day’s edition looking out. On the far wall is a large map of the world with six clocks spaced above it: Seattle, New York, London, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo.

Newsrooms are quiet now. It gives me the creeps. If typewriters and teletypes are long gone, so are most of the loud, profane, eccentric characters that used them, yelled “copy!” to summon the gofer copy boys and girls, and didn’t necessarily play well with others, particularly their bosses. The best of them had high-octane talent and taught me much. As a young reporter, I missed deadline by eleven minutes, prompting a screaming tirade from the city editor, who somehow was able to accomplish this bit of mentoring without ever removing the cigar from his mouth. I never missed deadline again. Now shouting is frowned upon, much less smoking. Shout and they’ll send you to HR for a talking-to, or maybe they’ll Myers-Briggs you, so you know what an inappropriate, extroverted, cynical bastard you really are, and how it’s offensive, especially to women.

The room is also quiet because of worry. It hasn’t been that long since the Post-Intelligencer closed and the Seattle Times always seems to have one foot close to bankruptcy court. Not that long ago, Seattle had been the last city outside of New York to have three

newspapers. Now it’s one of a handful of two-paper towns and the alternative press and blogosphere speculate about it being a no-newspaper town. I don’t think that will happen—this is a readers’ town—but the Free Press news staff is less than half its size in 2000. There’s an entire ghost newsroom on the third floor—up until 1957, it was the newsroom for the family’s afternoon paper, the Mirror. Once that closed, the room was given over to the features department. But with the cuts, features grew so small it could be fit into the extra space up here on five. More cuts could come any day. Everybody’s afraid.

The main newsroom is crowded. All the desks and cubicles are taken and reporters, photographers, and editors stand around. Maybe it’s a metro meeting. Bad time for a meeting. The daily deadlines are cascading now. Reporters will start filing stories and editors will be under pressure to make the early editions. The 4:00 news meeting will have to be pushed back. Halfway across the room, Melinda Stewart, the national editor, smiles at me, rolls her eyes, and runs a hand against her dark brown wedge of hair. When she smiles wide, it’s a goofy sexy grin that can lead you to underestimate her. She complains that I have gotten handsome as she has only gotten older. It’s not true—she’s as attractive as the first time I saw her twenty years ago. I smile back, then make a hard left and walk down a corridor toward business news, which is off in one of the building’s many out-of-the-way spaces. In fact, it sits on top of the presses in the five-story addition.

I pull the mail out of my cubbyhole and glance across the toweringly messy cubicles of ten business writers. Five desks are empty from the hiring freeze. One reporter who left and wasn’t replaced had covered Olympic International, and now that company has gone uncovered for three years. The business editor has an enclosed office with a door. I have one, too, but rarely use it. I unlock the door and leaf through my mail. There’s a pink envelope and, inside it, a card from Melinda Hines. I smile at my techno-luddite who won’t use email and stick the card in my pocket.

“The columnist graces us with his presence,” the business editor says. I ask her if she knows about Troy Hardesty.

“The young cops reporter told me,” she says, rising from her chair. “Why do all these kids have names like strippers? Amber, Tiffany, Crystal. God, I feel old.”

“Amber’s a nice name.”

“Mmmm. Anyway, newsroom-wide meeting. You’re just in time.”

“Oh, joy. What do you want to do about Hardesty?”

“Suicide, right?” She seems uninterested as we walk. “Another one bites the dust.”

“Maybe his fund is about to crater.”

“Just like 1929, huh? Well, good luck finding that. There’s probably no disclosure.”