The editor had called Ridl into his office three hours earlier. ‘Another cat, Your Lordship?’ Ridl asked. Earlier that morning, Eddings had sent him to photograph a white cat some fool had dyed red and blue in honor of the upcoming Fourth of July. Such had things deteriorated – for the cat, and for Ridl’s career at the Chicago Sun-Times.
Eddings held up Ridl’s sheet of double-spaced type. ‘“The dye job is so expert,”’ he read aloud, ‘“one can envision the cat on its hind legs, playing the flute, marching alongside patriots holding flags and muskets and beating drums.”’ He started laughing.
‘The picture’s even better,’ Ridl said, trying to summon a grin. The cat had been only the latest in his lunatic assignments.
Laughing even harder, his eyes wet, Eddings read on. ‘“Perhaps the cat’s owner” – oh, I so love this – “should be dyed in the spirit of celebration as well.”’ He wiped at a tear that was running down his cheek, crumpled the copy and threw it at the wastebasket in the corner, missing by a foot. ‘It’s time, Jonah. Absolutely, it’s time.’
Ridl reached for a cigarette.
‘This, just off the wire,’ Eddings said, shifting into the staccato, old-newsreel voice he sometimes fancied. ‘Murder on lovers’ lane.’
Ridl focused on steadying his hands enough to light his cigarette. Special Features didn’t do murders and, sure as hell, he didn’t do murders – not anymore. Special Features did the fillers that puffed up the paper: safe stuff like nonsense about dyed cats.
The editor leaned forward. ‘Just after midnight, under the fullest of moons,’ he whispered, almost in a moan, ‘a man was shot dead in the bucolic-’
‘That’s for Front Section, or Metro,’ Ridl said.
‘It gets even better. The man’s car was moved, and his girlfriend is missing.’
‘The girl he was trying to rape shot him with his own gun, pushed his body out, used his car to drive away and is hiding out? She’ll show up, dripping snot, warranting sympathy. Metro for sure, if Front Page takes a pass.’
‘This is perfect.’
‘It’s crime. We’re Special Features.’
‘More enticement.’ Eddings reached in his desk and took out a white envelope. ‘Being ever mindful of the pay cut you took to join us in the basement, I offer forty-five in expenses.’
Special Features never covered crime, and Eddings never offered expenses. ‘Where, exactly, did this horrific event occur?’
‘Grand Point, Illinois, population 4,032.’
‘That’s a hundred miles west.’
‘A little vacation. Talk to the local sheriff. Stay overnight.’ Eddings leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. ‘Tomorrow, maybe interview every shopkeeper in town.’
‘To con them into thinking we’re going to become a presence that far west of Chicago, so they’ll run ads with us.’ It was subterfuge, but there was even more. Eddings was testing to see if Ridl was ready to return to Metro, and crime.
‘You’ve been down here what, six months?’ Eddings asked, but really saying that six months was long enough.
‘You’d run the piece with my byline?’ Ridl asked.
‘Who pays attention to bylines?’ Eddings said, evading the question but meaning yes, they were going to test run Ridl’s name to see if it still attracted wolves.
Ridl owed the Sun-Times for those six months of cover. He should have been fired, if only to silence the community activists and local pols that wanted his head. Instead, the deputy managing editor got Eddings to create a place for him to lay low in Special Features.
He crossed to Eddings’s desk and picked up the expense envelope, damning the way his hand shook.
Eddings noticed. ‘Piece of cake, Jonah. A drive in the country, for advertising.’
Meaning this time Ridl could get no one killed.
‘We’ll talk about the byline when you get back,’ Eddings went on. ‘If you’re not ready, we’ll run it under my name.’ Then, grinning, ‘Just don’t forget the bucolic. We want our new advertisers to know that one lousy murder won’t stop us from showing their surroundings as idyllic.’
He drove to his apartment, packed a small bag and headed west to a small town a hundred miles west of Chicago.
Ready enough, at least, to commit bucolic.
SEVEN
The Peering County Sheriff’s Department was in the basement of a hundred-year-old red brick and gray limestone courthouse, set smack in the middle of a square surrounded by equally ancient storefronts, some laid up in the same sturdy red brick, others in cautiously painted white clapboard. The bricks were faded; the paint was chalking. It was another hot day.
Despite the heat, the courthouse lawn was lush and green, obviously tended by people who understood fertilizer. A farm couple – him in a seed cap, her in a sundress, both of them tanned and creased – idled near the sheriff’s door.
He went down the outside stairs. All four of the beige metal desks beyond the counter were empty. A pretty, slender, dark-haired girl in an orange University of Illinois T-shirt and cut-off blue jeans sat in the waiting area.
She looked up at him angrily, and mumbled something.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘You’ll have to yell, damn it.’
‘Anybody?’ Ridl shouted toward the wood door behind the desks.
‘Louder,’ the girl said.
Ridl turned. ‘Who are you?’
‘The press. Who are you?’
He ignored her. ‘Which paper?’
‘The Daily Illini.’
He thought he ought to call Eddings to say he was chasing the same story as a girl reporting for a college newspaper and no one else, but instead he screamed across the empty office. ‘Hey! Anybody? Anybody at all?’
The door opened a few seconds later. A sheriff’s deputy, no older than the college girl, stuck out a narrow head on a scrawny neck. ‘What?’
‘Jonah Ridl, Chicago Sun-Times.’ He held up his old Metro press card, pretty sure no hick cop this far from Chicago would recognize the name after six months. ‘You got a release?’
‘A what?’
‘A press release.’
‘About what?’
Ridl felt an instant’s nostalgia for the straightforwardness of the morning’s dyed cat: he’d gone; he’d photographed; he’d scurried back. ‘Maybe about the lovers’ lane killing that just happened?’
The young cop stepped out from the darkness behind the rear door. Though he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and wore neither a badge nor a gun, it was his too-large uniform that really killed the act. It was stiff and new and so oversized that his body seemed to wobble independently within it as he attempted a swagger across the office.
‘Well, I guess I’m the press what-cha-ma-call-it,’ he said, when he got to the counter.
‘Like hell, Jimmy Bales,’ the girl muttered.
‘Did I not tell you to leave?’
‘I’m press, same as him.’ She gestured toward Ridl.
‘You got no credentials, girl. Scoot.’
She made no move to get up.
The deputy’s face flushed deep red. ‘Shall I arrange to have you escorted out?’
‘By whom? There’s nobody around except you.’
‘Laurel Jessup!’
She swore under her breath and got up. She was six inches taller than Ridl’s five-five, all tanned skin, bone and no curves. And stunningly beautiful. She slammed the door behind her.
‘Damn college girl, thinks she’s so smart,’ the young deputy said.
‘How old is she?’ Ridl asked, before he could think not to.
‘I dunno; two or three years older than me. Why?’
‘Never mind. Tell me about the killing.’
‘Not much to tell. A man was found murdered on Poor Farm Road. His name was Paulus Pribilski, ex-Marine and, more recent, telephone lineman. He was twenty two, from Rockford, Illinois. We’re investigating.’