Deadline Man

“I don’t know what to do.”

“You can’t freeze!”

I study her face, flushed with passion. Then, quietly, “I never freeze.”

It’s craziness. It surrounds me. I fall back on curiosity and pull out my phone.

“Why don’t you use mine.”

I look over at her, but her eyes are on the road.

“Maybe they’ve tapped your phone, your computer, too. Use mine.” She slips me a sleek new iPhone. I use it to call an old source. He also happens to be the name of the Realtor on the for-sale sign outside the dark house on Mercer Island.

Ron Pohlmeir is one of the top residential real estate agents in Seattle. He calls himself “Nine Day Ron” for the speed with which he can sell a house, although since the bubble burst he might be Ninety Day Ron. He answers his home phone on the fourth ring.

“To what do I owe the honor of the columnist calling so late?” He sounds a little aggravated and a lot lit. I ask about the listing.

“What, you’ve gotten a big book advance?” he says. “Anyway, I thought you were an urban type.”

“Who’s the seller?”

“I’m not really comfortable getting into that.”

I needle and cajole—he’s been a helpful real-estate source, but he’s also gotten plenty of publicity by appearing in my column. When he finally gives it up, I almost can’t speak.

“You there?”

“Yeah, just swallowed wrong. Troy Hardesty?”

Amber gives me a sharp look.

“It’s been on the market for three months, and he was really on my back to find a buyer.”

“Why? Did he seem like he needed the money?”

“Don’t know,” Nine Day Ron says. “But that’s why his suicide shocked me so much. I got the sense he was really going to try something new. A new lifestyle, whatever.”

“What do you mean?”

“He said, ‘I want to be on the other side of the Cascades by the second week of November.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. Said it that way, and said it more than once.”

I repeat what Ron says. I want Amber to hear every word. I feel the need for a witness now, as we speed back to the glittering city very much on this side of the Cascades.

Chapter Twenty-two

Thursday, October 28th

Amber and I make plans. We will use only paper—paper documents, paper files. We will do it old school, the way it was done when I was a young reporter. We will have to find a safe place to keep the work—maybe rent a storage locker somewhere. Some place.

She is from the digital generation but apparently not of it. She doesn’t trust electronic files. Maybe part of that is her native messiness—a look at the stacks of reporter’s notebooks, files, and newspapers in the back seat of the Jetta confirms that. But she claims she has been burned by too many computer crashes, and now she believes I’m being tracked—online and on the phone.

I have been accused of being a neat freak. Maybe that’s true, but I know I’m lazy. I want to touch a piece of paper one time and be done with it. I love my emails, search engines, and electronic files. I love being able to research a corporation’s records online through Edgar, rather than waiting for Fedex to deliver paper 10-Ks and 13-Ds from the SEC in Washington like in the days when I was a young business writer. But my digital world is suddenly toxic.

Amber drops me off at the newspaper. The wind has eased and the sidewalk is empty. I decide to go in, using the side employee entrance, showing my ID to the security guard. I can hear the distant rumble of the presses. It is midnight. When the elevator door opens, I am visibly startled. Karl Zimmer, the old maintenance guy, is standing there, his tool belt hanging like a gun belt. I nod. He doesn’t speak. He stares at me hard. Lots of people outside the news department hold us in quiet contempt. We think we’re better than they are—that’s the sense, wrong to my mind. I always speak to the pressmen, janitors, phone operators, dispatch runners, advertising people, if only to dispel this little unspoken class war in the building. My background is probably as blue-collar as Karl’s. But like many in the building, he’s probably not unhappy to see the snots with their college degrees get theirs. He stays on the elevator when I get off.