“You are killing us with this Bo Hines crap,” Roxie Hendricks said as she slapped her sales reports onto the conference table. “Three more ad cancellations this morning since Sue Hines’ death hit social media. I’m losing more advertisers than I’m signing up.”
Our sales director and part-time copy editor on Mondays and Tuesdays, Roxie helped the paper survive hurricanes, recessions, and an assortment of protests, all without a hair out of place. Bright, determined, and opinionated, she spoke her mind on the paper’s news coverage and fought for themed issues to help her clients and attract new ones.
Her boyfriend had proposed last Christmas. I had approved her trading advertising in the Insider in exchange for a venue, DJ, photographer, and caterer for her wedding reception in two months. Roxie needed to maintain her sales commissions to pay for their upcoming honeymoon.
Roxie and I had more invested in the wedding than the boyfriend did. The bargains kept her motivated, and she didn’t mind playing the devil’s advocate in our staff meetings.
An Insider staff meeting was always a battle—few casualties, but lots of alliances, attacks, retreats, and regroupings of forces. My staff was younger than me, and the age difference gave them a safe distance from whatever trouble I caused. They lobbed flaming arrows at me from behind a nice, neat, generational barrier.
Well, they never played Atari, saw The Clash, or marched in an apartheid protest, so whatever I did was my own thing.
“It’s your paper,” Roxie added as she sat down with Teddy and Mal Taulbert, the married couple who were my art director and production manager respectively, A&E writer Jeremy Holt, and news reporter Doug Yoste. “I hope you know what you’re doing because it won’t be long before my church bulletin has more ads than this paper.”
Our resident pessimist, Mal smiled while she looked down at her notes that listed the problems encountered publishing that week’s issue, which she would run down with the group during the meeting. Smart enough to wait before she interjected herself into office battles, Mal hadn’t picked a side yet.
Most of the kids who applied to work at the Insider came from the University of West Florida where they studied things like communications theory while munching on bagels, drinking expressos, and playing hacky sack. Mal and Teddy were notable exceptions.
Mal had gone away to Loyola University in New Orleans where she studied political science and philosophy, fought for AIDS research, campaigned for Al Gore and John Kerry, and saw some decent bands. Her approval meant a little more because it was worth a little more.
She met her husband Teddy when he joined the newspaper in 2005 after Hurricane Dennis, which was our second storm in less than a year. The other was Hurricane Ivan.
My art director at the time had walked into the office and told me he was tired of cleaning up after storms and was moving to Atlanta. He introduced Teddy and said that the Air Force veteran, who had an associate degree in graphic design and deejayed at local clubs, would be his replacement.
During his one-month probationary period, Teddy learned how to lay out the newspaper. His skills as a photographer and artist took the paper’s look to a new level. Within six months, Teddy and Mal moved in together.
Teddy seldom voiced his opinion. He never talked about his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he had great cover design ideas that he worked out with Mal. Teddy drank his coffee in an Incredible Hulk mug, played with the ring that pierced his bottom lip, and waited to hear the story ideas for the next issue.
A cab had dropped Jeremy off at the office at nine-thirty. He had been slamming down Starbucks between cigarette breaks and was on such a caffeine high that he could barely contain himself. He had to jump into the discussion about the paper’s future, and he took Roxie’s side. He always did, bravely going where she had gone before.
“I can’t get anyone to return my calls,” he said. “Even the art galleries don’t seem interested in getting a story in our paper. They all worry about their donors pulling funding if they appear in the Insider. Now this news of Sue Hines’ death—.”
I cut him off. “This whole thing started because Bo Hines stole grant money intended to help the art galleries. They are why we did the story in the first place.”
Roxie interjected, “Yeah, but they and, more importantly, their board members and benefactors aren’t so sure that Hines stole anything. The buzz is you jumped the gun on this story.”
I held back my temper. Dare had told me the same thing when we published the news story. I didn’t have time for this mutiny.
“The audit backed up our reporting,” I said. “The state attorney charged him, and Hines will be convicted.”
“If there is ever a trial,” Roxie said as she took a long sip from her water bottle. She didn’t drink coffee. Mal snickered.
“We push ahead,” I said. “We did the right thing reporting on Hines. We all discussed the possible fallout. There will be a trial and it will validate everything we wrote.”
I sounded more confident than I felt and continued, “It would help if we could locate Pandora Childs. As the Arts Council director, she knows better than anyone what Hines did. Even if she had some part in the embezzlement, the state attorney would cut her a deal in exchange for her testimony. Anyone got any leads about where to find her?”
I asked this question every week.
Roxie and Jeremy shook their heads.
Teddy said, “I asked around again. She dated a bartender at Seville Quarter for a couple months when she first moved to Pensacola but hasn’t been seen for a while.”
“She was friends with one of our freelancers,” said Mal. “But all Tish would tell me was Childs liked to smoke pot and had started hanging out with some older man, but she didn’t know who.”
Doug Yoste finally woke up. He had been in a daze drinking coffee and staring out the conference room window. He needed three cups of coffee before he could form words into sentences. Wearing a vintage NBA Denver Nuggets T-shirt over jeans that looked like they had been worn five days in a row, Doug hadn’t shaved and needed to run a brush through his mop of brown hair.
He said, “I’ve had several people tell me her family had a condo in Destin. I’ve called her parents several times, as have the state attorney’s investigators. Childs didn’t have the best relationship with her parents. They had stopped talking with her since she moved to Pensacola. They didn’t text or email each other.”
“Keep asking,” I said. “I’ve got Harden working on it, too.”
Mal left the room and brought back the coffee carafe. She refilled everyone’s mugs.
“What can you tell us about Sue Hines’ death?” she asked me as she settled down and drank from her pink Hello Kitty mug.
I filled them in on the details Harden had shared without telling them about the confrontation with Wittman. Then we moved into the editorial portion of the meeting.
The cover story for next week was on Escambia County Sheriff Ron Frost’s request for more funds from the county commission for pay raises for his employees. Since it involved Frost, I took lead on the investigation, but I needed the sheriff’s office to release a few more public records.
“Do we need a backup plan if you don’t get the records?” asked Mal.
“If I don’t hear back by this afternoon, I’ll get the state attorney’s office involved,” I said. “Plan on thirty-five hundred words and two charts. Teddy, find us a current photo of Frost and his deputies working some crime scene.”
Teddy jotted down a few notes. He said, “We will have the online database ready to go live once we get the salary spreadsheets.”
Teddy and Mal had a friend who offered to design a searchable online database that would allow our readers to hunt for the salaries of all the sheriff’s employees. We would launch the database the same day the issue hit the newsstands.
I had taken Yoste off cover stories for two weeks because I wanted him to focus on a feature on Wittman’s maritime park petition drive. However, he still needed to do a couple of news stories.
Yoste walked the staff through the story ideas that he and I had discussed: gang violence in the middle schools, a county commissioner getting contracts for an aide’s husband, city staff sharing photos of nude women using government email accounts, and Sheriff Ron Frost’s last hunting trip.
Unimpressed, Mal said, “That’s nice, but which one can you deliver by Friday?”
“Gang violence,” said Yoste, more than a little offended that she had called him out again.
I kept the meeting moving. “Doug, send me a progress report on the petition story. You may have a difficult time interviewing Wittman. I’m not one of his favorite people.”
“I’ve already gotten him to answer a few questions,” he said, “and, yes, he hates you.”
Smiling, he added, “He likes me, though.”
Two years out of the journalism school at the University of Florida, Yoste missed his hometown and the fishing it offered. Though he had worked for the Tampa Tribune for eighteen months, the Herald showed no interest in hiring him, but Doug filled an important hole in our paper. An investigative publication without investigative reporters doesn’t last long.
“Will you make deadline on that story, too?” asked Mal. She was more of a managing editor than a production manager. She made sure we published an issue every week.
Her tattooed and pierced husband Teddy laid out all the articles, designed the covers, and did most of the photography. Mal handled the design of the ads, determined the space for the editorial and ads, and sent it all to the printer by 6 p.m. on Tuesday—that is if Doug turned in his copy on time.
Though weird and dramatic, Jeremy never gave Mal problems on Tuesdays. Any holdup would be Doug’s fault. He was a good reporter and could weave facts together well, but he was slow. I had no idea why he never improved. Mal and Roxie beat him up every time he missed a deadline. Still, at five thirty on a print night, he would be found staring at his computer screen looking as if somebody had asked him to move large rocks with his mind. Hollow-eyed and scared, he struggled to ignore the sighs and nasty comments from all around him and type out his article.
“Ted,” I said, “get with Doug on the cover. Mal, I will want more room for my editorial and plan on the letters to the editor being longer than usual. We will print all the hate mail as long as it’s somewhat coherent.”
“What about my stories?” chimed in Jeremy. “What am I supposed to do about the art galleries?”
“Get off your ass and walk down the street to the galleries. Take Teddy with you to take photos,” I said.
“Yeah, Jeremy,” said Mal, “whoever heard of an A&E writer that’s afraid to do face-to-face interviews or listen to bands in person?” She understood that Jeremy might use the ruckus as an excuse for not meeting a deadline. Since Mal was the master of all deadlines, it appeared I had her for an ally, at least for this meeting.
“I’m not the problem around here,” Jeremy said. “I make my deadlines.”
He directed his full bravado at our production manager, like a child standing in front of a mechanical pony outside of Winn-Dixie telling his mother that he wasn’t afraid. “And I listen to plenty of bands in person.”
“Yeah, right,” said Mal.
We wouldn’t hear from Jeremy again for the rest of the morning. He couldn’t wait to take a call from his boyfriend and discuss his woes over another cigarette in the alleyway behind the building. Roxie was another matter.
Ad sales were the lifeblood of our free newspaper. We didn’t have paid subscribers. Ads covered our costs. We had no reserves, and my savings had dwindled steadily since the Hines article was published.
I told her and the rest of the staff, “We’ve been here before, guys. The story was the right thing to do. Hines is a fake and stole taxpayers’ dollars that were intended to support nonprofits that struggle even more than we do to make ends meet. We can never hide from the truth.”
“But it’s my commissions,” Roxie said, not wanting to give up just yet. Big Boy walked into the conference room and put his head in her lap. The sales director scratched him behind his ears.
“Roxie, we have our Best of the Coast issue in six weeks. We will make up the lost ad sales, and besides the trial will be over soon.”
The paper normally sold about $45,000 to $50,000 worth of ads in the Best of the Coast issue that listed the best restaurants, shops, and businesses in Northwest Florida. Roxie knew it, and her commissions would start rolling in before her honeymoon trip.
“Email me the list of cancellations,” I said to her. “I will call or visit those advertisers by Friday.”
Meeting adjourned. Big Boy headed back to the couch while the rest of us went to check our email.
The office was one large space with exposed, ancient bricks and lined with windows that faced Palafox and Intendencia streets. The sun rushed through the uncovered windows and skylights making the room seem stark. The space had two small bathrooms and a break room that doubled as a conference room. My loft apartment occupied the top floor. Below sat Frank’s Pizzeria.
The building had been around since the mid-1800s. Before we moved in, it was a punk club where Green Day, The Wallflowers, and numerous less memorable bands played on their way to Atlanta, New Orleans, Orlando, or Austin. Before that, it had been a jazz club that hosted Al Hirt and Fats Domino. And before that, my barber Eddie told me that it was a “high-class” strip club, which meant the strippers had all their teeth. Before that, nobody remembered. The office was haunted, if only by residual punk angst.
Most visitors loved the feel of the office. Governors, state lawmakers, and anyone seeking national, state, or local office dropped in at one time or another. The staff worked on six-foot long plastic folding tables. Papers were spread everywhere. Framed covers of old issues covered the walls. The space looked how the office of an underdog alt-weekly should. It was cool.
My head was killing me, and the caffeine wasn’t helping. Summer Kay, our receptionist, walked over to my desk. She had handled the phones while we held our staff meeting.
“Hi, Boss.” Tall and skinny with long brown hair with a touch of red on the tips, Summer had a fondness for tight jeans and eighties rock band T-shirts. Today, it was Culture Club.
She handed me my phone messages and told me that the day’s deposit was $3,485. The first two messages were to call the state attorney’s office—not likely. Another message was from Bree asking that I have a beer with her at Intermission at 6:00 p.m.
When I asked Summer about Bree’s call, she elaborated, “She said she had a possible news story. She also wanted to know how you were you feeling.”
Dropping her voice to a whisper, Summer said with a concerned look on her face, “She told me about Jace Wittman. Are you okay?”
“I could use some ibuprofen, but other than that I’m fine.”
Outside my window, I watched the Palafox Street secretaries and administrative assistants stroll out to early lunches. Their dresses weren’t quite as crisp as they had been earlier, but the view was inspiring.
Big Boy strolled over, ignoring Summer, and begged to go outside. Usually Summer took care of the dog’s needs, which weren’t many, during office hours. I guess he wasn’t a Boy George fan.