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SEATTLE (Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, 6 a.m.)—Janet Andrews was waiting for him at the employee entrance when he got to work the next morning.
“What the hell is going on?” she demanded. She gestured with her coffee cup. “Cops are looking for you.”
“They often are,” he said wryly.
“It’s not a story, Mac,” Janet said firmly. “They said it was personal. Something to do with Donnelly? They want you to come down to the cop shop for questioning. I’m supposed to call them when you show up. So what’s going on?”
Another reporter came into the building. Both fell silent until she left. “Come on,” Janet said. “Let’s go down the street. We can’t talk here.”
Mac trusted Janet Andrews, as much as he trusted anyone at the Examiner, so he walked out of the building with her and down the street to the coffeehouse she frequented. It was a dark hole in the wall, with jazz music and foreign newspapers left on the tables. More paper, Mac thought ruefully. The barista knew them, brought over a large coffee with cream for Janet and a Mountain Dew for Mac.
“I don’t know how you can drink that stuff at 6 a.m. in the morning,” Janet grumbled as she always did.
“And I don’t know how you can drink coffee at all,” he responded. And smiled. It warmed his face.
“We’ve been friends nearly since the day you arrived, right?” Janet said.
Mac shrugged with agreement. An odd friendship, even for him, and he specialized in odd friends. She was 10 years older, white, middle class, had a house in Magnolia. Single, some ex in the past somewhere, he thought, and a workaholic. Who would have thought she’d be able to understand him? You’d expect her to be one of those ladies who wouldn’t ride the elevator with him.
“Since the day you, ah, intervened, after I accidentally kicked Ballota in the head,” Mac agreed.
She laughed. “Accidentally kicked Ballota in the head,” she mimicked.
On his third day at work a bunch of them were standing in the break room talking. Ernie Ballota was shadow boxing with him a bit.
“Knock it off,” Mac said, trying to focus on what the young female reporter from Lifestyles was telling him. He turned away from Ernie to pay better attention to Adrianna, who was far cuter and more his type than Ernie Ballota would ever be.
When the next punch came, Mac only caught the motion of it out of the corner of his eye and reacted instinctively.
“You kicked me in the head,” Ernie wailed from the floor. “And broke my glasses.”
There was silence until Janet Andrews spoke from the doorway. She leaned against the doorjamb, took a sip of coffee. “Marines or Seals?” she asked.
“Marines,” Mac mumbled, thinking shit, this may set a new record for the shortest held job he’d ever had.
She’d nodded, looked at Ernie. “Go see a doctor, Ernie, get your glasses fixed. Put in for workman’s comp. Next time realize that not everyone thinks being attacked is just play. You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.”
She had looked at Mac. His hair was almost shaved off — he’d had dreads but figured that might not go well on a new job — and he was standing there, muscles bunched, fists clenched. “You either pulled your kick, or you’ve been out long enough to lose some of your reflexes,” she said.
“Pulled it,” Mac said. “Saw her there,” he nodded toward another reporter standing silently behind Ernie. “Was afraid I’d hit her, too.”
Janet nodded. She looked at the others in the room. “The reflexes stay around a long time.”
The reporters looked at Mac, some with understanding, some with a bit a fear, but they nodded.
Mac reached down and helped Ernie up. Ernie hesitated, but he took the hand.
“Now let’s get some work done,” Janet said firmly. Everyone else filed back to work, and she took him for a walk around the block to get rid of the excess adrenaline.
Sitting across the table from her now, Mac grinned at her. “Could have been the shortest job tenure ever held at the Examiner.”
Janet shook her head. “Not a chance. Had a reporter once who left for lunch his first day and never came back. Said he’d had enough.”
Mac shoved the newspapers around on the table. A headline caught his eye — another metro newspaper — the New Orleans Times Picayune — was reducing to a three-day-a-week newspaper. He tapped the story. "You see this?"
Janet nodded. "Saw it on the wire yesterday.”
The newspaper industry was in a state of flux. It was more complicated than the typical mantra of ‘newspapers are dying’. Small town newspapers were doing fine. Ethnic papers and other niche publications were booming. Websites were doing well. The problem was revenue from websites didn't fund the huge metro papers like the New Orleans Times Picayune. Or the Denver papers, or the Detroit paper. The Seattle P.I. had gone to online only five years ago or so. The Seattle Times was family-owned and staying the course, but there had been layoffs.
"You hear anything about us?" Mac asked. The Examiner was locally owned and controlled, so it didn't have the huge corporate overhead that dragged chain newspapers under. But still, advertising revenue was down. Fewer pages were being printed. Web was increasingly important.
Janet shook her head. "Nothing that drastic. At least not yet," she said. "Although we may see layoffs again soon.” She leaned across the table and tapped his arm. Mac looked at her startled. She rarely touched him. “You’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you?”
Mac told her what had happened Wednesday night.
“What do you have to do with Donnelly? Do the cops know about the attack on you?”
“No. And I don’t have anything to do with Donnelly, although I was planning on beating some answers out of him. Those bastards who tried to kill me came using his name.” Mac shrugged. “Then I came to work, you said Donnelly had been shot. The rest you know.”
She nodded and reached for her cell phone. “Nick, it’s Janet Andrews.” She paused. “No, he hasn’t started work yet. Why you all looking for him, anyway?”
She listened again. “Come on Nick, give,” she said, then listened some more.
“You think Mac tried to kill him? How come? Don’t give me that confidential crap. This is a reporter you’re talking about. You arrest a reporter for the attempted murder of a cop, and you’re going to have media from God knows where descending upon us.”
She shifted the phone a bit, used to the larger phones a person could tuck between shoulder and neck. Mac cracked his knuckles and stretched his hands. “Okay. If he comes in, we’ll come down together. I’ll have the Examiner’s attorney join us. Not necessary? Of course the Examiner will represent him. He’s a reporter.”
She listened a bit more, said good-bye and hung up. Looking at Mac thoughtfully for a moment, she tapped her fingers on the table. “You have witnesses to where you were for most of Wednesday night?”
“Yeah. Except for the hour or so that I was in a car trunk, tossed into the Sound, and crawling my way out,” Mac said.
She snorted. “Donnelly had your juvenile files on the table when he was shot. They now have his blood on them.”
“The cops think I killed him because he had my juvie records?” Mac asked incredulously.
“Yeah. You got anything in those records that would be worth blackmailing you?”
Mac laughed. “For what? I’m a reporter, remember? You know all too well what I get paid. Donnelly was just an asshole.”
She laughed too. “Cops been reading too many thrillers,” she said. “Maybe it was better when cops were functionally illiterate.”
She sipped her coffee, keeping her eyes on him as if he’d disappear if she looked away. She sat the cup down, ran her hand through her hair. “Anything in those records you would rather I didn’t know about?”
Mac hesitated. “I doubt there isn’t anything you haven’t guessed,” he said slowly. “I was pretty wild.”
She rolled her eyes, watched him carefully. Mac looked around the cafe. There were other serious coffee drinkers with cups in hand and newspapers to hide behind. One man was smoking, in spite of the signs, and no one said anything. Normalcy.
He’d never seen anything like it until he had fought in a war, three undeclared conflicts, and one relief action that still woke him with nightmares.
He looked at the woman across the table, wondering what she’d understand, how much to say. Or to say nothing. She was watching him patiently, letting him decide. He looked at her hands, noticed once again the scar on her left wrist. She had things in her past, too, he thought. Things she doesn’t talk about.
“Mom was 15 when I was born. Not sure who my father is,” Mac said. “By the time I was six, I was running wild. By the time I was 12, I was pretty much on my own.”
“Where was this?”
Mac shrugged. “Chicago, San Antonio, East St. Louis.”
“You got around,” she observed. “Although not to the best of places.”
He shrugged again. “My uncle—Lindy’s ex—was living in Vallejo with his new wife. Toby, my cousin, is a year older than me, and his dad had custody of him. So I was shipped off to live with them.
“They tried. But both of us were wild. My uncle’s black; Toby looks like him more than like his mom. So pretty soon, Toby’s in deep with the Crips, and I’m on my way.” Mac paused, thought about how much he owed Toby for insisting that Mac not get too involved. Too bad he hadn’t taken his own advice.
“By the time I’m 15, Lindy’s got her act together up here in Seattle. She’s bought a house, teaching at the university, and so both of us are shipped here.” He shook his head and laughed ruefully. “Like turning wolves loose in new pastures. We ruled this place.”
“And so you developed a juvie record,” she said sardonically.
“Yeah. MIPs, mostly. Curfew violations. Carrying a weapon. I don’t know what else they might have. Suspected gang affiliate probably written down somewhere.”
Janet looked away, calculating something, and then laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“That’d be about ‘99, or so right?” He nodded. “Well so when cops were talking about the California gangs moving north — taking over, recruiting -— that’d be you and Toby?”
Mac laughed too. “Us, and others like us. Lots of Californian families tried the same thing—get the kids out of the gangs. Probably were some recruiters too. But yeah. Me and Toby.”
A lot of things he’d done weren’t in the police files, Mac knew. He’d been lucky enough — at the time he’d thought it was about being good enough — not to get caught.
“When I was 16, we got caught with a boosted car. I did detention, but Toby was 18 and he did time. It made me think,” Mac said slowly, choosing carefully what he wanted to tell and setting aside the rest. “I could have gone to college; I had football scholarship offers all over the state. Track too. But that would have been just more of the same. So, I walked into a Marine recruiter’s office and signed up. A month after graduation I was in the Marines. Four years later, I was back, going to college with the help of Uncle Sam, and the rest you know.”
“Minus the parts you have no intention of telling me,” she observed. “Doesn’t sound like something that could be used as blackmail against you.”
“Shit, you wouldn’t need the records to find it out,” Mac said. “Some of the older cops remember me. They don’t say anything, but they know. You could ask around. You could just ask me.”
Janet nodded and finished her coffee in one long swallow. “Look, Mac. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’d suggest we do what I told Rodriguez we’d do: go down to headquarters, have Leatherstocking meet us there. You tell them what you know, and we clear this up.”
“This probably isn’t job related,” he said. “I can handle it.”
“Possibly,” she conceded with a nod. “But it may be job related. Doesn’t happen very often, but it’s happened. You can get up and walk out of here, and I’ll tell Rodriguez you never showed for work this morning. But then you’re on your own. You play it my way, you’ve got a hot-shot attorney on your side, the power of the newspaper, and you got me,” she added with a smile. “I’ll free you up for three days to tell me if this is a story or not.”
“If it is?”
“Then you follow it and write it.”
“And if it isn’t?”
She shrugged. “Then take a week’s vacation and follow it up. You don’t have to do this lone soldier mode.”
Mac nodded slowly. “Okay, boss. Let’s go talk to the cops.”
Michael J. Leatherstocking was a tall, slim man in his 40s who was given to wearing impeccably tailored suits in a town where nobody much cared about such fancies. He looked like the successful, rich attorney he was. And no one suggested that his client be questioned down in lock up. Instead, they were shown into a conference room. Two detectives sat at the table. Leatherstocking took a seat opposite them and gestured to Mac to sit beside him. Janet took a chair on the other side of Mac. Two uniformed officers stood at the door.
“My client is willing to cooperate fully with this police investigation,” Leatherstocking told the detectives. “However, the newspaper has some concerns about how this proceeds. Police should not be questioning a reporter of his knowledge of a crime.”
“We should when we think he did it,” growled Nick Rodriguez. He was standard cop issue, in his 40s, beefy but no gut yet.
“Oh, come on, Rodriguez,” Mac said disgustedly. “You think I tried to kill Donnelly because he was going to tell what was in my juvenile records? I didn’t know he had them, until Janet told me this morning. But even if I had known... I wouldn’t have killed him over it. Now, if he’d tried to blackmail me with them, and showed up the next day with a black eye and a broken nose, yeah, then sure, come looking for me. But kill him for it? What was he doing with those records anyway? They’re supposed to be sealed.”
“That is being investigated as well, Mr. Davis,” the other detective said smoothly. He was a black man who had stayed in better shape than Nick Rodriguez had. “Right now, however, we are talking about your movements Wednesday night.”
“Were there other files found at Donnelly’s house?” Mac asked, his reporter instincts kicking in.
“That’s enough! We’ll ask the questions. Where were you Wednesday night?” Rodriguez said angrily.
Mac shrugged. “I played pool at Johnnie’s until about 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. People will remember. Got out to my car, my keys were locked inside it. Called a friend to come get me, he took me home. When we got there, someone had broken in and beaten up my aunt. I called an ambulance and spent the rest of the night down at the hospital. Got my car this morning on my way to work.”
“You file a police report on that break in?” the other detective asked.
“I don’t know you,” Mac said.
“This is Detective Stan Warren,” Rodriguez said, a bit too hastily. “He’s in charge of the investigation.”
Mac nodded. “I assume the hospital filed something.”
“And you have witnesses to the rest,” Warren said.
Mac shrugged. “Yeah, except for the hour or so I spent trying to break into my own car.”
“Donnelly never told you he had your juvenile files.”
“Look, it wasn’t that long ago. People down here know about that stuff,” Mac said with exasperation. He looked over at the uniformed officers. “Joe, you tell him.”
One of the older officers at the door nodded. “It’s true, Lieutenant. I hauled him and his cousin home more times than I like to think about. Us older cops, we remember him. No big deal. Your aunt going to be okay, Mac?”
“She’ll be fine,” Mac said.
“Do you own a gun, Mr. Davis?” Warren asked.
“Sure. All licensed, and carefully stored.”
“You own a Glock?”
Mac nodded warily, uncertain where this was going.
“We’d like to run tests on it.”
“Not without a warrant,” Leatherstocking interjected. “I don’t see what grounds you’d have for it. Do you have any evidence that points to my client being in the vicinity of Donnelly’s house Wednesday night?”
The detectives said nothing. Mac wondered suddenly if his guns were where they were supposed to be. Had the men who’d beaten Lindy had time to find his guns? Shit, he hadn’t even thought to look. He was getting slow, life’d been too good of late. He’d gotten the 9mm out but didn’t check the others. He wanted to kick something.
“So what you’ve got is an injured officer. A dirty cop who had files he wasn’t supposed to have. And the best suspect you can come up with is a reporter who’s got witnesses for his whereabouts? Gentlemen, you’ve got nothing,” Leatherstocking said, standing up. “Do you have further questions?”
“The hell I’ve got nothing,” Rodriguez said angrily. He stood up too, leaning on the table. “I’ve got a cop in IU with a bullet in his head! He’s in a coma and the name he’s muttering is Mac Davis. “His face turned red.
Mac said nothing. The thought that came to his mind was if he’d done it Donnelly would be dead, not in a coma. Didn’t seem real astute to say so, however.
“Wasn’t me,” he said.
“Then why is Donnelly saying your name?” Rodriguez demanded.
“Guilty conscience?” Mac said flippantly.
“This isn’t going anywhere, gentlemen,” Leatherstocking said firmly. “My client has cooperated. If you want to ask more questions, call me and I’ll arrange another interview.”
Mac pulled out his notebook, wrote down Johnny’s Bar, and Shorty’s name and telephone number. “I assume you can find the ambulance and hospital records without my help,” he said dryly.
Nick Rodriguez took the list, glanced at it and handed it to the uniformed cops. Joe looked at the names and shook his head. “Shorty that scrawny Filipino kid you used to run with?”
“Yeah, he’s teaching high school math out in Bellevue these days,” Mac said.
Joe shook his head again. “They’ll check out, Nick. But we’ll run them.”
Leatherstocking headed to the door with Mac and Janet following behind him. Janet turned at the door. “Is there anything new in the investigation?” she asked. “You’ve scrambled my day to hell with all of this. And I’m not going to be able to use Mac on the story.”
“We aren’t in the habit of calling the newspaper with information,” Stan Warren said stiffly.
Nick Rodriguez rolled his eyes. “The PIO will call, Janet. But we don’t have much more than we had yesterday — except for Mac here, and I doubt if you’ll be printing that.”
Janet nodded and led the way out the door. Leatherstocking escorted the two of them out to the sidewalk. “It doesn’t sound like they’ve got much, although I don’t like the Glock bit. You sure it’s where it is supposed to be?”
Mac shook his head. “Break in that night, remember? I didn’t think to check them. They’re in a locked box under my bed.”
“Well, I’d do so now, and I’d have a witness when I did it,” the lawyer said. “I think there was quite a bit that you didn’t tell the cops. How much of what you said was true?”
“Most of it. I left out a few things.”
“Can they pick holes in it?”
“If they try hard enough, I suppose,” Mac admitted. “But the people they are going to be talking to aren’t the kind to volunteer much.” It would help if he could get a hold of Shorty to tell him to not complain about the wet seats to the cops. As if he would.
“Okay. Janet knows how to reach me if I’m needed again. But I think you’re in the clear.” He waved down a taxi and left them.
Janet glanced at her watch. “Hell, it’s already 10 a.m. Here’s a list of phone numbers for me. Stay in touch. Remember you’re working for me on this story, so keep me up to date, you hear? And if you need something holler.”
Mac nodded, put the business card in his pocket.
"Mac," she said, and he stopped and looked back. "The cops aren't stupid. Someone is bound to wonder why you of all people couldn't break into your own car."
His smile was lopsided. "I'm out of practice? Car locks are better these days?"
She ignored that. "If they find out about those thugs and that they used Donnelly's name when they came looking for you, the cops will have the motive they're looking for. You can't tell me you wouldn't have been headed after Donnelly if you hadn't had to take care of Lindy."
“Yeah, but the hit on Donnelly happened before the hit on me,” Mac pointed out. He shook his head. “It doesn’t make much sense.”
"Take care of yourself," she said, and turned to walk away.
"I always have," Mac said.