“What? Wait a minute.”
“Uh-oh. I ga go.”
“Hold …” But Donaldson heard the phone slam repeatedly as Ardsley tried to find its place in the cradle. Then there was a dial tone.
“Eyech,” said Donaldson. He dropped his own phone home and wiped his hand clean on his shirtfront. He tilted back in his chair. “Hey, Anna Lee?”
The night city editor lifted her chin to him. Ah, Anna Lee. She was an elegant piece of work, all right, long and slim in her fashionable suit, with short black hair and a pixie’s face. I had been trying to get her to sleep with me for months but she had some kind of prejudice against married men. She was spouse-ist.
“That Beachum guy on death row?” said Donaldson. “Didn’t he confess today or something?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Anna Lee. “Wait a minute.” Those long, lovable white-painted nails of hers tapped their way back through the wire stories on her terminal. “No, here, wait,” she said. “They retracted that. The governor’s office says they don’t know where the story came from but ‘they deny having any information to that effect.’ ”
“Great. The cop who headed the case just called up and said Beachum’s innocent.”
“Whoa!” Anna Lee perked up at that. “Did he sound reliable?”
Donaldson mimicked Ardsley’s drunken slur. “He say it muzza been some nigguh peeza shit.”
Anna Lee perked down again. “Terrific. Hold page one.”
“Yeah,” said Donaldson. “St. Loo’s finest.”
But he called me anyway. First the beeper, then the phone at home. When he got no answer, he sat back in his chair, watching his monitor, watching the cursor blink at the bottom of his burned-wife story.
Because he was not the sort to leave the matter there. He wanted to get home and get laid, sure. And he thought Lieutenant Ardsley was a vicious hamhock who couldn’t even tell a polluted version of the truth. But he knew there was a man’s life on the line, and he was thinking it might be wise to call Bob at home and run the story past him. He even vaguely considered following it up himself.
But that was when he heard Anna Lee start to cry.
He looked over at the city desk and saw her sitting with her hand on the telephone as if she had just hung up. Her normally composed, wry and elfin features were splotched and contorted. Her other hand shielded her eyes and the tears poured out from under it, making black tracks of mascara on her high cheeks.
By the time Donaldson was out of his chair, there were two other night side reporters moving toward her, as well as the assistant night city editor and a movie reviewer from across the room. Nobody didn’t like Anna Lee.
The staff gathered around the city desk and stared as their editor wept. Except for Harriet McConnel from county side, they were all men, and they stood there silent and abashed for long moments, watching Anna’s lean body shake with sobs.
Finally, Donaldson, irked, looked up at Harriet.
“For Christ’s sake, Harry, ask her what’s wrong,” he said.
“What’s wrong, Anna Lee?” asked Harriet McConnel.
It was another few seconds before the night city editor could swallow her tears and lower her hand-and blow the Beachum story completely out of Donaldson’s mind by saying simply: “Michelle is dead.”
3
Five years earlier, a minor functionary of the state’s Democratic party had approached the Reverend Harlan Flowers in the south city church where the reverend was making his name as a young firebrand. The functionary was a small, bald, pink-faced man who had a damp red smile and a dry, mirthless chuckle which Flowers found peculiarly unattractive. The functionary explained in fairly plain terms that he wanted to contribute a substantial sum of money to Flowers’s discretionary funds. In return for this donation, Flowers would be expected to ensure that the members of his congregation were registered as Democratic voters, transported to the polls come election day and encouraged to vote their party’s ticket from the governor’s office right on down the line. The functionary-rapidly swiping at his smile with a handkerchief-pointed out that Flowers would thus be serving his people-black people-twice over: once by receiving funds which could be used for the betterment of the neighborhood (or not, as Flowers saw fit) and again by pushing them to vote for that party which had “historically been in the forefront of your people’s struggle.” Despite this dual inducement, Flowers refused the donation. To be fair to both the reverend and the Democrats, a Republican functionary turned up only three days later offering substantial sums to ensure that Flower’s congregation did not go to the polls at all-and he was refused as well. Finally, a number of Flowers’s fellow churchmen showed up, expressing the opinion that Flowers was being naive about the political process and otherwise getting in the way of a pretty good thing. When Flowers explained that it seemed immoral to him to sell his vote let alone the votes of his parishioners, the other ministers trooped from the room wearing very serious expressions indeed.
About six weeks after the election, one of these same ministers took to his pulpit to announce in tones of thunderous regret that he had come into possession of disheartening news. Charges had been made, he said, that a certain neighborhood servant of God had strayed from the path of righteousness so far as to misappropriate church funds for his own uses, patronize various local establishments of sin and abuse the trust of at least one young girl who had come to him for spiritual guidance. The young girl was produced, the press was alerted and investigators from both the city and the state were dispatched with what some might have felt was remarkable alacrity. The Reverend Harlan Flowers was in deep, deep trouble.
The scandal that followed was not the less painful and debilitating to Flowers for the fact that he was guiltless. The sight of his name in the newspapers linked to financial boondoggles he hadn’t the nature to devise and sexual improprieties he hadn’t even the inclination to commit, was like a stone gargoyle perched atop his heart devouring the inner substance of it day after miserable day. There were nights during that period when Flowers fell on his knees and begged his God to kill him as a mercy. There were mornings when he awoke made almost faithless by the fact that his prayers had gone unheeded and his consciousness had been allowed to return.
He was saved the disaster of an indictment finally by our froggy friend Cecilia Nussbaum. The circuit attorney soon got wise to the real nature of the charges and not only called off the local dogs but journeyed to Jefferson City where many a political buttock was made to resemble a football field after a particularly rainy Sunday. As for the reporters, after about the fifth time Flowers told them that he had been rigorously faithful to his wife for all seventeen years of their marriage, it finally occurred to them that this was a pretty original defense for a public figure. In fact, they began to feel it was so preposterous it might just be true. And the moment the sex charges evaporated, the financial peccadilloes that had been discovered in the church books appeared miraculously to be exactly what they were: the result of Flowers’s sloppy and indifferent accounting procedures. With a few self-examining editorials to cover their retreat, the media withdrew.
It was a full year before Flowers reestablished himself in the Florissant ministry where Bonnie Beachum found him. Here, his congregation steadily grew, and the functionaries of both political parties, wary of tangling with La Nussbaum again, resolved to gather their votes elsewhere.
But if the scandal did no permanent damage to his career, it had a profound and lasting effect on his personality. In his old parish in the south city, he had been a fierce and crusading activist, a fighter against local drug lords, a gadfly to the mayor and a frequent face on local news programs as he badgered the state and city governments for money and programs to help the slums. In the north, after the scandal, he turned his attention away from these big issues, and it was said by some that he had lost heart for the fight. He became the grave and quiet figure Bonnie knew. When he was away from his church, he spent his time visiting hospitals and clinics; he presided at funerals and comforted the mourning; and he made incessant calls at those prisons where sundry sons and husbands of his congregation had come to reside. He stopped declaiming against the evils of crime and poverty and abandoned his guerrilla war against the injustices of society as a whole. In fact, he seemed to have lost his taste for making moral judgments altogether and concentrated his attention on reminding anyone who would listen that God cared for the least of their troubles as he did for the farthing sparrows. The media, of course, lost interest in him completely. And so, for the most part, if he gained the support and affection of his little church, he dropped from the larger public’s view.