Sam Pierce was buried.
I wasn’t there, but Clay was. I’d been advised by my boss, my attorney, and my own common sense to stay far away from the service. Because killers sometimes attend their victim’s funeral, I figured the cops would use my presence at the ceremony as further evidence of my guilt.
But I remained curious about the service. So I hovered by the edit booth where cameraman Luis Fernandez was loading the funeral scenes into the station server. Videotape is a thing of the past in most newsrooms; now stories are shot on digital cards. Normally photographers screen the best shots and edit out the extraneous. Reporters and producers view the remaining video later on their computers.
“Luis, I’ll babysit the booth if you’ll let everything load,” I said. A shot he considered slop I might consider significant.
“But this isn’t even your story,” he pointed out.
“But I want to watch it anyway.”
He agreed, leaving me and my notebook alone in a room the size of a small closet.
The funeral ceremony took place at a cemetery chapel, not a church, so I figured Sam must not have been the religious type, which probably made it easier for him to commit the sin of gossiping guilt free.
I noted, with some satisfaction, very few flowers and only a dozen or so mourners. None of them seemed teary eyed, either. Then I felt ashamed of myself and wondered if I was really any better than the deceased.
Plenty of folks insist there is only a fine line between news and gossip. Especially since the tanking economy has made all media organizations a bit desperate for audiences. Technically news is supposed to be the truth, while gossip only contains a grain of truth. No doubt, newsrooms will debate the coverage of pop king Michael Jackson’s death for years to come as one of those irresistible overkill situations.
I quickly shifted from philosophical to embarrassed when Clay caught me looking at his funeral video and banged on the edit door window. The video on-screen was a zoom shot of a large photo of a flamboyant Sam on an easel next to a closed casket.
“Hey, you weasel.” He opened the edit room door. “I should have guessed you’d be in here.”
“Can’t we watch together? Please?” I asked. “You got my headless lead.”
He weighed my request. “Okay, little lady, but you owe me like banks owe taxpayers. A debt you’ll probably never repay.”
This time I didn’t object to either the moniker or the metaphor, figuring he was probably right.
“Any good sound?” I asked.
“Not really. Afterward, a newspaper editor gave me a short bite about waiting for justice, but no one else wanted to go on camera.”
Clay leaned against the wall because squeezing a second chair inside was impossible. Another wide shot came up on-screen, and I reflected that for all his bluster, Sam must have led a lonely life to have such a bleak turnout at a highly publicized funeral.
Was he mean because he was lonely? Or was he lonely because he was mean? The “Piercing Eyes” newspaper logo sat propped against another easel on the other side of the casket but gave no clue to the answer.
A minister gave a generic talk about how unfair life and death can be. He didn’t include any personal anecdotes about Sam, probably because they’d never met. But he also didn’t quote any Bible verses about gossips being the root of all evil.
Something caught my eye, and if Clay hadn’t been watching with me just then, I’d have stopped the video, because one of the floral arrangements seemed almost identical to the wildflower bouquet I’d received at the station. Luis had shot a close-up of the sympathy card but didn’t hold still long enough for me to read it.
Then the camera panned across the audience, but the angle was mostly the backs of heads; individual mourners were hard to identify. I recognized a homicide detective off in one corner. Standard procedure.
A good-looking man whom I didn’t recognize sat in the center front row. He wore his suit dark, his hair slicked, and his expression sober. Perfect funeral attire.
On one side of him sat the Minneapolis newspaper’s top editor. Next to her, another editor whom I’d met once before, but I couldn’t remember his name. They had come to support the soul of their fallen comrade.
A couple rows behind them, I was surprised to see Rolf Hedberg sitting beside a couple of other print reporters. After his inflammatory remarks about Sam, showing up for his funeral seemed almost hypocritical. But I know from personal experience that it’s much easier to badmouth people when they’re alive than dead. This might have been Rolf’s way of making amends.
On the other side of the good-looking man sat a well-dressed elderly couple. I assumed they were Sam’s parents, until the older gentleman turned his head.
I gasped in recognition, almost hyperventilating. Clay kept asking me what was going on. But I stayed mum because sitting in the front row of Sam Pierce’s funeral were my parents.
“What do you see?” He shook my shoulders. “Tell me.”
I shook my head, pretending to be choking; I might not have been able to keep up the ruse much longer, but a shrill scream came from down the hall toward the newsroom.
We both scrambled to open the door and get there first. After all, a scream can mean news.
Clay beat me by about a second and a half. Not bad considering he was a decade younger.
When I got around the corner to the coffeemaker counter, I saw Sophie, our lead news anchor, standing in front of an open refrigerator … a dead bat by her feet.