Beauregard whacked his palm on the table. The sound made Martin flinch.
“There ain’t gonna to be any more stories like this,” he said. “No more running around pretending you’re the cast of Law and Order. Ya get me?”
“Now that was inspiring,” I said. “I think Ben Bradlee once gave the same speech to Woodward and Bernstein.”
For that, Joe Pesci would have put a bullet in my brain. I figured Beauregard would fire me on the spot. Instead, he laughed out loud.
“You might have a future in stand-up yourself,” he said. “But you sure as hell ain’t got one in the newspaper business.”
“Nobody does,” I said.
Beauregard nodded in agreement. “On my way in,” he said, “I saw your name on one of them Pulitzer medals. I think I saw it on a Polk Award, too. You have my respect for that, Mr. Mulligan. But the economics of the news business have changed, and we gotta change with it. If Ben Bradlee himself walked through that fuckin’ door and begged for a job, I wouldn’t hire the bastard. And if Woodward and Bernstein were working here, I’d fire both their asses. The age of newspaper heroics is over. Today, the only job of the news department is to fill the holes between the ads. Do I myself clear?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Mr. Twisdale?” Beauregard said.
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “One last thing.” He picked up his copy of the Sunday paper and waved it in Twisdale’s face. “I’m told you never sent this story to our copy center. Is that right?”
“It is.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Copyediting this story properly required an extensive knowledge of Rhode Island law and politics. That is something the professionals at our copy center do not possess. Under the circumstances, I thought it best to do the job myself.”
“You’re the managing editor, pal,” Beauregard said. “I don’t pay you to be a goddamned copy editor.”
“I understand, sir.”
I should have left it alone, but as usual, I couldn’t help myself.
“The clowns you are paying to be goddamned copy editors are useless,” I said. “They edit in more errors than they fix.”
“Oh, is that so?” Beauregard said.
“Yeah, it is. If you’re hankering to recoup the hundred grand that’s got your jockstrap in a bunch, the copy center would be the place to start.”
“I’ll take that under advisement, Mr. Mulligan. Meanwhile, I believe we can realize some immediate savings. When I leave this room, I’m taking somebody’s head with me.”
He swept his eyes across the three of us, hoping to make us squirm. Only the ad director did.
“Mr. Martin,” Beauregard said, “get the fuck out and don’t come back. Security will pack up any personal crap in your office and ship it to your home address.”
35
“Why do you suppose he singled out Martin and not me?” Twisdale asked.
“Because Martin was a nervous wreck,” I said. “The poor bastard couldn’t stop sweating. You stayed cool, and I think Beauregard respected that.”
“I came off as cool?”
“You did.”
“Inside, I was shaking.”
He rested his elbows on his desk and clasped his hands in front of him.
“So we live to fight another day,” he said.
“We do. Should I tell you where I’m going next with this investigation, or would you prefer that I keep you in the dark?”
“You heard Beauregard. No more stories like this.”
“Yeah, but ‘like this’ is pretty vague,” I said. “That gives us some wiggle room, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t.”
I chose to ignore that and pressed on.
“We know that Pichardo, Longo, and Templeton refused the bribes,” I said, “but I’ll bet at least a few of our thirty-eight state senators and seventy-five House members took money from the Alfanos. I want to find out who they are.”
“Oh, hell no. You want to go through another meeting with Beauregard the Destroyer? Next time, he’ll fire the both of us.”
“Until he does,” I said, “I’m gonna keep doing my job. How ’bout you?”
Twisdale folded his arms across his chest. “Easy for you to say, but I’ve still got a wife and kids to support.” He paused, self-interest and self-respect at war on his face. “But just for the sake of argument, how would you propose to go after this?”
“Most legislators are successful lawyers and businessmen,” I said, “so if they suddenly started installing swimming pools or buying new luxury cars, no one would think anything of it. But about two dozen of them live paycheck to paycheck. Lovellette paints houses for a living. Parkinson is a sixth-grade teacher. Franklin is a prison guard. Berube got laid off by the Post Office last March and hasn’t worked since. For people like them, twenty grand would be hard to resist.”
“If they were smart,” Twisdale said, “they’d sit on the dirty cash for a few years and wait till the heat dies down.”
“Sure,” I said, “but most of them aren’t smart. And some of them need the money right now.”
“Yeah, I get that. But what would you do, exactly? Drive around and look for new SUVs in their driveways or front-end loaders digging up their backyards?”
“For starters, I’d ask a P.I. friend of mine to tap his bank sources, find out if there’s been unusual activity on their credit cards.”
“Spending sprees?” he said.
“Or paying off large balances.”
“Wouldn’t it be illegal for the P.I. to do that?”
“Only a little.”
He leaned back and stared at the ceiling, thinking it over.
“I’m not comfortable with this,” he said. “Besides, I don’t see how it would help us. You might find something that looks suspicious, but it wouldn’t prove anything.”
“No, but it would tell us which legislators we should take a closer look at. Once we start asking questions and digging deeper into their finances, there’s no telling what might shake loose.”
“I don’t know, Mulligan. I mean, how long would all this take?”
“Maybe three or four weeks if I work it full-time.”
“Uh-uh. No way I can spare you that long.”
“Come on, Chuck. It’s an important story. If the Masons were still running the paper, they’d put three or four people on it.”
“But they’re not, so it would have to be just you-and mostly on your own time again.”
“That would take me two or three months,” I said. “By then it will be too late.”
“How do you mean?”
“The governor’s going to send the gambling bill to the legislature this week. There’ll be hearings in both houses, but it will probably come up for a vote in about a month.”
“So?”
“So once the votes are counted, all we’ll be able to do is expose a few sad sacks for taking bribe money. That would cause them a world of hurt, but what good would it really do anybody? The sleazebags who’ve been spreading money around already will have gotten what they paid for. The damage will have been done.”
“I guess that’s how it’s going to have to be, then,” Twisdale said.
He’d grown some balls in the last week, but Beauregard had snipped them off.
“Fuck you, Chuckie,” I said.
I pulled myself from the chair and stomped out.
A fresh stack of press releases was waiting on my desk. Still fuming, I sorted through them and identified the winner of the day’s stupid press release challenge:
“We are proud to announce that East Bay Exotic Animals of Johnston, Rhode Island, has been designated the official pet store of the Providence Vipers.”
The team wouldn’t have been all that proud if they’d bothered to check the store owner’s criminal record. Over the last five years, he’d been fined three times for violating the federal prohibition against the importation and sale of endangered species.