“Add interstate transmission of a threatening message to what I just said.”
“Let me help you, Jack. I can, believe me.”
“Run along to the police station, Freddy. Now put the sergeant back on the phone.”
Freddy Lounds’s Lincoln Versailles smelled of hair tonic and aftershave, socks and cigars, and the police sergeant was glad to get out of it when they reached the station house.
Lounds knew the captain commanding the precinct and many of the patrolmen. The captain gave Lounds coffee and called the U.S. attorney’s office to “try and clear this shit up.”
No federal marshal came for Lounds. In half an hour he took a call from Crawford in the precinct commander’s office. Then he was free to go. The captain walked him to his car.
Lounds was keyed up and his driving was fast and jerky as he crossed the Loop eastward to his apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. There were several things he wanted out of this story and he knew that he could get them. Money was one, and most of that would come from the paperback. He would have an instant paperback on the stands thirty-six hours after the capture. An exclusive story in the daily press would be a news coup. He would have the satisfaction of seeing the straight press—the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the sanctified Washington Post and the holy New York Times—run his copyrighted material under his byline with his picture credits.
And then the correspondents of those august journals, who looked down on him, who would not drink with him, could eat their fucking hearts out.
Lounds was a pariah to them because he had taken a different faith. Had he been incompetent, a fool with no other resource, the veterans of the straight press could have forgiven him for working on the Tattler, as one forgives a retarded geek. But Lounds was good. He had the qualities of a good reporter—intelligence, guts, and the good eye. He had great energy and patience.
Against him were the fact that he was obnoxious and therefore disliked by news executives, and his inability to keep himself out of his stories.
In Lounds was the longing need to be noticed that is often miscalled ego. Lounds was lumpy and ugly and small. He had buck teeth and his rat eyes had the sheen of spit on asphalt.
He had worked in straight journalism for ten years when he realized that no one would ever send him to the White House. He saw that his publishers would wear his legs out, use him until it was time for him to become a broken-down old drunk manning a dead-end desk, drifting inevitably toward cirrhosis or a mattress fire.
They wanted the information he could get, but they didn’t want Freddy. They paid him top scale, which is not very much money if you have to buy women. They patted his back and told him he had a lot of balls and they refused to put his name on a parking place.
One evening in 1969 while in the office working rewrite, Freddy had an epiphany.
Frank Larkin was seated near him taking dictation on the telephone. Dictation was the glue factory for old reporters on the paper where Freddy worked. Frank Larkin was fifty-five, but he looked seventy. He was oyster-eyed and he went to his locker every half-hour for a drink. Freddy could smell him from where he sat.
Larkin got up and shuffled over to the slot and spoke in a hoarse whisper to the news editor, a woman. Freddy always listened to other people’s conversations.
Larkin asked the woman to get him a Kotex from the machine in the ladies’ room. He had to use them on his bleeding behind.
Freddy stopped typing. He took the story out of his typewriter, replaced the paper and wrote a letter of resignation.
A week later he was working for the Tattler.
He started as cancer editor at a salary nearly double what he had earned before. Management was impressed with his attitude.
The Tattler could afford to pay him well because the paper found cancer very lucrative.
One in five Americans dies of it. The r
elatives of the dying, worn out, prayed out, trying to fight a raging carcinoma with pats and banana pudding and copper-tasting jokes, are desperate for anything hopeful.
Marketing surveys showed that a bold “New Cure for Cancer” or “Cancer Miracle Drug” cover line boosted supermarket sales of any Tattler issue by 22.3 percent. There was a six-percentile drop in those sales when the story ran on page one beneath the cover line, as the reader had time to scan the empty text while the groceries were being totaled.
Marketing experts discovered it was better to have the big cover line in color on the front and play the story in the middle pages, where it was difficult to hold the paper open and manage a purse and grocery cart at the same time.
The standard story featured an optimistic five paragraphs in ten-point type, then a drop to eight point, then to six point before mentioning that the “miracle drug” was unavailable or that animal research was just beginning.
Freddy earned his money turning them out, and the stories sold a lot of Tattlers.
In addition to increased readership, there were many spinoff sales of miracle medallions and healing cloths. Manufacturers of these paid a premium to get their ads located close to the weekly cancer story.
Many readers wrote to the paper for more information. Some additional revenue was realized by selling their names to a radio “evangelist,” a screaming sociopath who wrote to them for money, using envelopes stamped “Someone You Love Will Die Unless . . .”
Freddy Lounds was good for the Tattler, and the Tattler was good to him. Now, after eleven years with the paper, he earned $72,000 a year. He covered pretty much what he pleased and spent the money trying to have a good time. He lived as well as he knew how to live.