Lady in the Lake(30)
Ambition comes off this one like heat. Where did you come from? I want to ask. Didn’t you have a husband, pretty as you are? Is Bob Bauer trying to get into your panties? You wouldn’t be the first, the way I hear it. Mr. Family Man, Professional Nice Guy. There are no nice guys in this business, but you’ll learn that soon enough.
I make her start bringing me my lunch.
June 1966
June 1966
“Okay, scoop—we’re going to let you try out your training wheels.”
Calvin Weeks, the assistant city editor, loomed over Maddie, an ominous piece of copy paper in his hands. Only two weeks into her job, Maddie already knew the legend of Calvin Weeks and his “black beans,” which he usually shoved into reporters’ mail cubbyholes at the end of his shift. He typed these missives on carbon paper, keeping the originals for himself and bestowing the smudgy duplicates on the reporters. Perhaps those smudges were why they were called black beans, but no one really knew. Calvin Weeks had been an assistant city editor for almost twenty years and he had been dispensing black beans for nineteen of them.
“There’s a reason he’s been in that job for so long,” Bob Bauer had told Maddie. “You’ve heard of the Peter Principle. This is the Cal Corollary, the newspaper’s version of the Hippocratic Oath. First, do the least harm. That’s why he’s on the three-to-eleven shift. If a big story happens late, the overnight editor takes over. If news breaks during the day, the big bosses are here. Weeks is a traffic cop at best, directing the flow of copy.”
It was three thirty p.m. Maddie’s workday ended in ninety minutes. That should have been all the excuse she needed not to slip her neck into the noose that Cal was holding. “I’m off at five.”
“I’m sure Don won’t mind if I borrow you.”
Mr. Heath nodded, a master surrendering his servant. Did he have the power to do that? Who was her true boss? Maddie should probably figure that out.
“There’s a little party this afternoon,” Cal continued. “Normally, we’d just send a photog. But with all the Negroes being so upset these days, the big boss thought it was a good opportunity to generate a little goodwill, show that we don’t only write about the riots and muggings.”
He handed her the piece of paper, the black bean, reciting its contents as she scanned it: “Violet Wilson Whyte is celebrating her twenty-ninth year on the police force today. Isn’t that something? The first Negro cop was a woman. So there’s a little party for her, at headquarters. You go by, get a few quotes—how she got started, how honored she is, rutabaga, rutabaga—and file six inches. We’ll use it inside tomorrow.”
Rutabaga, rutabaga was another Cal tic, his version of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Again, no one had a clue how this had come to be. He reminded Maddie of an actor she had seen in The King and I at Painters Mill, a mediocre one who was nevertheless extraordinarily pleased with himself as he strutted the stage in that dusty tent theater. He had entered for one scene by marching up the aisle alongside Maddie’s seat, his cape flying behind him, although Maddie did not believe capes were worn by Siamese royalty. The cape’s hem, flowing behind him on eddies of summer heat, had whipped the corner of her eye. It hadn’t hurt, but the unexpected contact was startling and Maddie gave a little yelp. The actor had looked back, smiling as if he had bestowed a gift, then continued steaming toward the stage, where he proceeded to destroy Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics with a performance that appeared to be modeled on Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
She tried again. “I’m off at five.”
“Then you better get going.”
She understood, or was pretty sure that she did. The press release had come in late, but some higher-up was demanding it be done and Cal was carrying the bigger boss’s water. The year was shaping up to be one of unrest throughout the United States, riots breaking out in various cities. Baltimore had been spared so far. Maddie was being given this “big chance” because Cal assumed she was too timid to file for overtime, or she was hungry enough for a byline to forgo her right to extra pay.
He was right on both counts.
She walked up to police HQ, showed her Star ID. “That’s not a press pass,” she was told.
“I know,” she said. She didn’t. “But I work there. They sent me here because Mr. Diller is busy.”
Yet Diller, the police reporter, was in the room. Why couldn’t he write the story? But Maddie, again courtesy of Bob Bauer, knew why. Diller couldn’t write anything. He called in his facts, then the rewrite man shaped them into a publishable article. It was a beginner’s job and most men angled to leave the police beat as soon as possible, eager to write the words that appeared beneath their bylines. Diller had no desire to move on. Diller could dictate the facts about a Negro woman if she were dead; he could do that in his sleep. But faced with a story without a crime, he wouldn’t have a clue where to begin.
Maddie took out her thrillingly fresh reporter’s notebook and tried to keep up with the police commissioner’s rote, banal compliments. She had never learned shorthand and she wasn’t sure how one was supposed to get quotes exactly right without it, but she did the best she could on the fly, creating her own set of abbreviations. The room was crowded, but the cake, not Violet Wilson Whyte, seemed to be the star attraction. When the commissioner insisted the guest of honor say a few words, she kept her comments short and spoke softly, but with a notable confidence and authority.