The story had run off the front on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and the only ball that rolled had been the one that flattened Mira’s career. The calls had started at 7 A.M., overwhelming the morning cop reporter, the only person in the office early on a holiday morning. Mira’s subject was a penny-ante con artist, hopelessly delusional. On the day the civil rights protesters had marched on Gwynn Oak, he had been serving time for larceny. His dream may have been true, but little else in the story was. He didn’t even own the house he was willing to mortgage.
Who would lie about such a thing? What was the point? “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” one of the older reporters told her, in seeming sympathy, but Mira suspected he was rejoicing at her blunder. Although neither she nor her story was cited in the subsequent memos and workshops, everyone knew why they were being reminded to run criminal record checks and pull the clips. If Mira had compared her source’s stories to the original coverage, she would have seen he was wrong on several key details.
The Saturday night cop shift had been her self-selected penance. She had cut a deal with Nostrildamus and the secretary who kept the pay sheets, agreeing to work six days a week for straight-up comp time instead of overtime. Comp time the bosses knew she would never take, because she didn’t even use up her two weeks of vacation time. That was another part of the culture here: no one got ahead by taking time off. If the union knew about her arrangement, they would shit, but the union took twenty-two dollars a week out of her paycheck and what did it do for her? Oh, they had been ready to defend her when she screwed up, but that was more for them than for her. The union wasn’t going to get her downtown full time. If Maryland law had allowed it, she would have quit or refused to pay the dues. Then Nostrildamus would know where her true allegiance lay.
So she was downtown one night a week. Just her luck, Saturday nights went cold when she arrived. The good stories, the page-one stories, now seemed to happen every other night of the week. There was nothing to do but read the wires and other newspapers, which didn’t actually interest Mira much. Mira liked the idea of newspapers, enjoyed telling people she was a reporter, but the daily product meant little to her. Her passion was hitting milestones, accumulating tangible proof of her advancement.
Now she was stuck. In this city, in the suburbs, on permanent Saturdays, in limbo. She was even between boyfriends, unusual for her. She no longer remembered why she had chosen journalism, but she remembered her determination to succeed in it. She was not going to slink off to PR. Thank God she hadn’t jumped ship in the dot-com boom, which had lured so many of her friends away, then stranded them. She was not a failure. She got lots of “good jobs” from Nostrildamus and the occasional fifty-dollar American Express gift cheque, largely in recognition of all that unpaid overtime. She was being reborn. It was just taking so damn long.
For some reason, this made her think of the story from one of the western states, where a mother had hired a rebirthing coach to help a troubled child, and they had ended up smothering the girl in her own vomit while simulating passage through the birth canal. Now that would be a good story. She could do something with that. What could she do in a city where it was just boom-boom-boom, one lowlife taking out another lowlife, and not even at the hours that fit her schedule?
The night editor’s voice interrupted her reverie: “Call for you, Jenkins.”
“Put it on 6129.”
“I know the extension,” the night editor said. He was quick to remind Mira of everything he knew-and everything she didn’t know. A few months ago, on a freezing winter night, he had ordered her to go stare at a street sign on a forlorn corner five blocks north because she had misspelled it in a brief. She had gone downstairs, hidden in the ladies’ room off the lobby, and come back a suitable interval later. “ Centre Street,” she had said, “C-E-N-T-R-E,” pretending humility, shivering a little for effect. She had checked it on the map she kept in her purse. “I won’t get it wrong again.”
“Newsroom,” she said on a sigh. “Mira Jenkins.”
“You’re a reporter?”
The very challenge in the voice, the unearned hostility, signaled trouble. The night editor must have forwarded one of the regular nuts just to play with her.
“Yes, I’m a reporter. I cover police on Saturdays, but during the week I’m out in Baltimore County.”
That should scare her caller off. Nuts always wanted to talk to the most important people, Nostrildamus or one of the metro columnists.
“How old are you?”
“I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Is there something I can help you with tonight?”
“Oh, it’s rel-e-vant.”
The husky female voice was perplexing. The syntax was ghetto, but the pronunciation was sharp, exaggerated. It reminded Mira of the way people speak after drinking, when they’re trying to convince others they aren’t drunk.
“How may I help you?” Mira repeated. She must not lose her temper with any caller, no matter how rude. One unhelpful word to the wrong person, a person who knew Nostrildamus, and she was beyond rehabilitation.
“You can help by knowing a little history. You know history?”
“I like to think I do.”
“You know local history?”
The rhythms were definitely ghetto to Mira’s ear, but she had to be careful. There were some politically connected types who spoke that way.
“Is there something I can do for you tonight?”
“A baby disappeared.”
“Yes, we’ve been following that story.” Another chore done by the day cop reporter, who had thoroughly covered the absence of leads and the Baltimore County cops’ refusal to say whether they thought this was a stranger kidnap, a domestic homicide, or something in between. Nostrildamus didn’t like the story, Mira had heard from the night editor when she came in today. “I predict,” the executive editor had said at the Friday four o’clock news meeting, “that this will prove to be a sad but small story. The media has gone overboard in its coverage of such stories, which have no true global importance. I predict”-finger held aloft-“that it is time for the pendulum to swing the other way.” No one in the meeting had the heart to suggest that Nostrildamus might see the future differently if the child had been white and middle-class, instead of a biracial girl from a marginal city neighborhood. “If you want page-one treatment from the Beacon-Light,” the night editor had told Mira, “you need to disappear from a better part of town. Preferably his.”
The night editor was just trying to make her feel better for being elbowed out of a story that had actually happened in one of her duller-than-dirt neighborhoods. Mira’s only contribution so far had been to ferry a photo downtown, which had earned her a ’trib line, even though the desk forgot to use the photo.
“You have been following,” the voice agreed. “Now you need to lead.”