Deadline Man

The newsroom is empty except for a skeleton crew of a couple of copy editors, an assistant city editor and a cops reporter. The paper has been put to bed and will only be remade if there’s major news. I feel exhaustion overtaking me, but I want to make one last check.

Back in my office, I spend the next hour going through my files, both in the computer and the filing cabinets. I meticulously go through my electronic address book. I go through stacks of business cards. No Nybergs. Nothing that would involve Ryan Meyers. No connections. The only thing that stands out is the last quarter of a notebook from a year earlier.

Newspaper writers use all sorts of notebooks: yellow legal pads, steno pads and a long, narrow sheaf of paper called the reporter’s notebook. I use reporter’s notebooks. They’re about eight inches long, three in

ches wide, with thin cardboard on each end and held together by spiral wire. I usually use one for all sorts of interviews, then put it in the files when it’s full, marking it by dates. I’m too lazy to write every story it was used for on the cover, unless it’s highly sensitive. In that case, it goes in a file box along with the other documents related to that story. I haven’t needed to do that since I was an investigative reporter, and the danger of being sued or challenged was ever-present.

The notebook that catches my attention looks like all the others. But when I see its dates, I decide to thumb through it. Sure enough, the last quarter of it is notes I took for a column on Troy Hardesty a year ago. My idea had been to look at the local money men who had survived the big crash. But for whatever reason, Troy had been especially forthcoming and other column topics were backing up. So I used a cheap columnist’s trick, took a shortcut, and just profiled Hardesty. Now I hold those notes and involuntarily check behind me, making sure nobody is around. These are Troy Hardesty notes that never made it to the Feds. I slip the notebook in my pocket. Then I send an email to Faith at the IT help desk and log out for the night.

I leave the way I came in and walk along the Seneca Street side of the building. Soon I am illuminated from the bright lights flowing out of four-story-tall glass windows. It’s the best show in this part of town and it happens every night. It’s been too long since I’ve seen it.

Through the glass, the giant printing presses are running at top speed, turning rolls of blank newsprint into today’s Seattle Free Press, my column included. They make the sound of a distant thunderstorm. The paper shoots up and down through the gears, drums, and rollers of the towering machines as ink imprints stories, photos, and graphics. Finished papers are automatically cut, folded, collated, and set onto fast-moving conveyors that will take them to the loading docks. Pressmen in blue uniforms monitor control lights and panels on the sides of the presses. A couple of them stand scrutinizing the finished editions, page by page. They’re all my age and older. Unlike the old days, they wear fancy ear protection.

In the newsroom, the paper is put together with the latest computer programs. Page designers do everything and more that the old printers used to handle in the back shop, the last of whom were bought out eight years ago. But the printing presses remain, the muscular manufacturing process that puts news on paper. When I started, the pressroom was grimy, the presses old, noisy as hell. It looked exactly like something out of the black-and-white movie Deadline USA, where Humphrey Bogart as fearless editor defies a threatening mob boss. Now it’s surgical-suite clean and high tech, with stainless steel catwalks surrounding Goss Uniliners that can print 80,000 copies per hour in full color. They’re still loud. I can hear them—feel them—through the glass.

The Free Press is one of the last major metros that still prints downtown, rather than using a satellite plant out in the suburbs. I sit on the metal bench on the sidewalk and watch in a wonder that has never diminished. The company installed the bench several years ago, facing toward the big windows, with metal arms every few feet so the bums don’t sleep there. A statue of a 1930s newsboy stands next to it, his mouth frozen in a call of “Extra! Extra!”

How many times have I been here, in all weather, all hours, and stages of life, often sporting a glow of liquor from the nearby Puget Embassy. We all called it the Putrid Embassy, or just the Putrid. It was the last newspaper bar in Seattle. The place was long and narrow, smoky and dear. The booths were ancient and the walls were decorated with notable Free Press front pages. It was run by an old Greek, who would run us out at two a.m. exclaiming in his wonderful accent, “got to go, got to go!” When I qualified to run a bar tab, I knew I had become a real newspaperman. The bar had closed four years ago, replaced by a Starbucks. But the presses still thunder.

In less than sixty days, all this may be gone. That was the press, baby. Still, the presses center me. I won’t freeze. I turn away, aware that this time last night I was with Pam. She was still joyously alive.

But another realization pushes all this away. I stand on the empty sidewalk. Free Press trucks crowd along the street waiting to pick up papers, their tailpipes blowing fog into the night air. One has a billboard on its side advertising my column. I ignore all this. After one of the worst days of my life, my brain finally reconnects.

I know that blonde.

I’ve seen her before.

The blonde who was watching my place. I’ve seen her before. She gave me the shoulder block that day by the elevator, the day I was leaving Troy Hardesty’s office. She must have been headed in.

Chapter Twenty-three

Years ago, I was part of a team of investigative reporters sent to Texas, to look into a rash of unsolved drug killings. In some cases, they were classified as suicides, such as the man who lay naked in his bathtub and shot himself three times with a pump-action shotgun. Law enforcement was compromised. Big drug money will do that. Only the Texas Rangers and a few local cops were trustworthy. They suggested that we be armed at all times. Our ethical qualms went away once we found that the dealers had contracts out on us. This in the days before lawyers and HR people had castrated newsrooms. We didn’t bother to tell the bosses.

I did my job with a gun in a shoulder holster and a rock in my gut. There was the ever-present knowledge that a bomb could be under the car; that guys with submachine guns could appear out of the night. I learned about the Columbian Necktie and how many bodies are sitting in oil drums in the Gulf of Mexico. We moved around a lot, stayed in small-town motels. I was glad to leave. The fear stayed with me a long time after I left Texas and our stories were winning awards and putting people in jail.

I have that rock in my stomach again. I also still have the gun, a Smith & Wesson .357 short-barrel Combat Magnum in blue carbon steel with custom grips. I am a good shot. It feels heavy and comforting in my hand, and I think hard about carrying it. I decide against it.

It’s twilight as I step aboard one of the Third Avenue buses and ride up to Brasa, a restaurant that was very chic a few years ago. But the money and madness of a few years ago are gone, replaced by worry and waiting. The bar is half deserted. I sit at a table by the window, facing in. Twenty minutes later, Wendy Chan walks in, sees me, waves, and walks over.

I haven’t seen Wendy in three years and she’s cut her hair. From lush and straight touching her shoulders, it’s now very short and no doubt chic. It still strikes me as a cancer-survivor ‘do, but she is radiant as always, a smile briefly playing across her delicate features.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” she says as we sit. “You know that I got married. I’m really happy.”

I tell her I’m glad about it.

“Don’t get me wrong, we had fun. But it’s over.” The server arrives, takes our orders, and goes away.

“I just wanted to talk,” I say. She looks at me suspiciously. Her lawyer look, I used to call it, back when Wendy worked for the U.S. Attorney’s office. From her LinkedIn page, I found that she had moved to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That would have been an impediment to our relationship back then. Now I hoped it might help me.

“What about you? Are you holding up? I read about the newspaper. How it might even close. Awful. You’ll be okay, of course. Are you still rescuing birds with broken wings and then letting them fly away?” She smiles. “Am I still on your account at Megan Mary’s flowers?”

“I have a real girlfriend now.” I don’t know why I say this, but I do.

She looks relieved and I begin a slow seduction of another sort, interrupted briefly as our drinks arrive. Wendy makes the common protestations about talking to the press.

“I keep secrets all over town,” I say. “Cheers. I don’t want to quote you. I just want some guidance before I go off half-cocked.”

She studies her white wine for a couple of minutes after taking the first sip. For several seconds I worry that she will just get up and walk out. Then she sighs and cocks her head slightly, a mannerism I still find sexy when she does it.