It wasn’t my job to do murder investigations. That’s what the cops were for. And there were obvious handicaps for reporters. We have no subpoena power. We have no access to forensics. We have limited investigative resources, particularly on second-rate papers like The Citizen.
So of course I solemnly vowed, as I drove back to the paper, to do whatever I possibly could to find out who killed Diane and Carolyn Madigan in cold blood as Hurricane Angela (its official name) approached South Florida.
I didn’t make this vow because the sheriff had decreed that I pursue the story. Fuck the sheriff. I could have spent a few days on it, then told him it couldn’t be done. I made the vow because of the brutality of the crime, and to help Sandra Wilson.
The woman haunted me, I was finding. I’d spent, what, a half-hour with her? Forty-five minutes, maybe? And she was hardly the first grieving family member I’d ever interviewed. Hell, I couldn’t count them all, or remember them. So the degree of my commitment to her made no sense, at least on the surface. But maybe I saw her as some kind of Everywoman Victimized By Florida. Maybe she reminded me of Helen, my ex-wife and mother of my only child -- hardly a victim but so vulnerable in her moments of sadness that she made me crazy. She wasn’t clinically depressed; nor am I. But neither of us are what you’d call sunny personalities. Probably a factor in our break-up -- we both had trouble coping with the other’s down periods. In her case, excessive self-involvement was also a problem. That’s not my thing -- I’m more into martyrdom, even though my ex is the one who’s Jewish. (I’m Swedish and Dutch, a WASP to the core.).
And then, in this situation, there was the grace-of-God factor.
As in (many could say to themselves): “I came to Florida, just as they did. To escape. I came for a new life. And look what happened to them, innocent women. It could have been me. There but for the grace of God . . .”
What little I knew of the case justified this response. Diane Madigan had come to Florida on the heels of a very difficult divorce in New Hampshire, her sister had told me.
She was a nurse, and nursing jobs were plentiful in South Florida. She wanted a better life. She was tired of New England winters, tired of her relationships, tired of not being in control.
Probably, she was tired of who she was, and thought she could re-invent herself amid the tropical breezes of South Fucking Florida.
Or at least that’s the way her life seemed to me. As a reporter, I didn’t know very much. But I knew a little, and I had to draw some conclusions. I had to justify my existence, not always an easy task in the newspaper business.
Carolyn was harder to draw conclusions about. She had followed her mother to Florida. But why? Because they were friends and all they had was each other?
Sounded reasonable. Sounded like a short paragraph in a routine newspaper story. Something I’d be tempted to write, quickly. But did it sound like the truth? Was it the truth?
I had no idea. I needed to do a lot of work on the case before talking about truth. And even then it was a dangerous word to use. We used it a lot in my profession. Of course you could say that half a truth is better than none. But I’d rather not.
Frank said: “I’m not quite clear on this. How long have you been in the business?”
“Christ, you sound like I tell a different story every day. How could you not be clear on that?”
We were sitting in the little cafeteria at the paper. Or rather, the dispensing-machine room. It used to be a cafeteria but the brass got rid of it. Too expensive. A cost-cutting measure, one of many in the past few years as the price of newsprint went up and circulation plummeted and the Internet came along and advertisers began to wonder about the paper’s viability. And so on and so on. A familiar tale by now. Called survival. The paper’s. Mine. I’m locked into print. I’m a journalist, a newspaperman, not a dotcom man, to coin a word.
“Well, you said you were out West for quite a while, and you said you worked in New York for a few years and you said you worked in a few other places I forget.”
“The Midwest. Ohio and South Dakota.”
“Oh, right.” He stirred his coffee with a little plastic stick, a smirky look on his face. “Anyway, maybe my math is bad, but it seems like you’d be fucking ready to retire by now if you put all those places together.”
“Right, Frank. I might as well hang it up.” Frank was baiting me. I think he was a little jealous: he’d worked day in and day out for decades at the same newspaper, and that was it. His career. He was 52.
“You know, going from paper to paper -- that kind of shit went out in the sixties,” he said, the smirk stretching into a full-fledged grin. “Boomers. They called them boomers. People who boom from one place to another. We used to have a few here. But not lately, not for many years. Until you came along. You’ll probably be leaving pretty soon, right?”
“Could be, Frank. I’ve been here almost a year, after all.” I paused, trying to get Frank on the track I figured he wanted to be on. He hadn’t asked me to have coffee to give me grief about the places I’d worked. In fact, he was probably just tired of talking to 26-year-olds.
I finally said, “So, what’s going on?”
“Well, I’m a little concerned.” Frank’s demeanor changed completely; he shifted into a somber mode. He was one of those ruddy-complexioned Irishmen (only a trace of Scotch) with an unruly shock of red hair, but I figured it was touched up to cover the grey. Made him look a lot younger. No wonder he was still on the chase. A charmer, and better preserved than me, though older. I’m tall, 6-foot-2, but carry too much weight, and my eyes usually look tired. I feel tired, for 41. Frank was slimmer, with a little more snap.
“About what? Let me guess. Our pal.”
“Yeah, who else? Jake, I swear that little fucker’s out to nail me to the cross, right here in River City.”
“What’d he do now?”
Frank let out a long, slow sigh. “It’s that malpractice case. Remember? A little goodie I picked up while covering courts for a week. Well, I’ve been working off and on ever since to see that doctor -- when the damn sheriff lets me have a free moment -- and finally I got an interview set up. I’d done all this elaborate preparation, got depos from the patient’s lawyer, all sorts of shit. Then at the last minute, the doctor pulls out of the interview. On his lawyer’s advice, naturally. Good advice, but I’m fucked.”
“And let me guess again -- the sheriff blames you for the doctor cancelling the interview.”
“Right. He says I should have anticipated it and been ready, with or without the interview. He hasn’t got the vaguest fucking idea how difficult it is to do a malpractice story. I’m basically protecting the bastard from a major lawsuit. He has no appreciation of that.”
“So you got into it with him, and . . .?”
“And he threatened to fire me if I didn’t get the story.”
“Jesus Christ, Frank. I’m sorry. Didn’t realize it was that bad.”
“I don’t know what the hell to do.” He stared into his cooling cup of lousy coffee as if the answer might appear there, like those Eight Ball gadgets you shake and My Sources Say No floats to the surface. “The story’s nowhere without the doctor. I can’t just string together a lot of unproven allegations. This ain’t a supermarket tabloid. This ain’t the Internet.”
“Of course not.”
“But that’s what I might have to do to get the asshole off my back.”
“Jesus, Frank.”
The sheriff had backed him into corners before, but I’d never seen my friend look so trapped. Or so scared.
“I tell you, I’m losing sleep over this one,” he finally said. “Since he took the job, I’ve pretty much ridden things out. But this time . . .”
“How about going upstairs? Go over the sonofabitch’s head. Maybe that would work.”
“Are you kidding? They’ll back him all the way. He’s golden, apparently. Has been all along.”
“Nobody’s unbeatable, Frank.” I was unsure if I believed that. “Just stay cool. Don’t let the bastards break you. We’ll come up with a plan. I guarantee we will.” That I did believe -- when I said it, at least.
Frank pushed his coffee away. “This is cold. I’ve got to get going. Thanks for listening.”
I lingered in the non-cafeteria, more worried about Frank than I’d ever been before, and I’d been pretty damn worried. This on-the-skids paper he’d devoted his professional life to could break him. The sheriff could break him.
The truth -- if I could be so arrogant and presumptuous as to use that word -- was that after nearly a year at the Citizen, I existed in a state verging on shock at what I, Frank and the rest of the staff had to deal with. I tried to put up a front to Frank. What else could I do?
I had worked for big papers, a couple of very good ones, for most of my career, and had never had to deal with so-called colleagues like the sheriff. The industry was fucked up all over -- transformed and/or threatened by the new technology, the new economy -- but at major papers you did not have inexperienced, mediocre people masquerading as high-level editors who knew what they were doing. You did not have people attacking other people to camouflage their own professional inadequacies.
I found it a tiresome litany that wore me down. And of course it made me regret what I’d done in the fortieth year of my life: left New York for Florida, thinking it a change of pace, thinking I’d relax a little, that warm weather and beaches and a medium-sized paper with a strong attachment to community added up to an appealing prospect. A good new life. I was ready: things had not worked out at the Daily News in New York. The legendary tabloid was put out by real pros but was a notoriously difficult place to work in its own way. Favoritism and vicious politics were rampant and unrelenting. I’d survived there a good while, though, when one mid-level editor suddenly decided he didn’t like me, or I was dispensable, or both. He shoved me on to a late shift where I was assigned secondary stories that were either killed entirely or dumped in the back of the paper. Soon I was among the walking wounded, then the walking dead.
Sometimes in those situations at big league papers you can wait things out, because good reporters’ fortunes can rise and fall and rise again. But I’d been around a while, and my patience had worn thinner with each new newsroom, and then after five years or so the Daily News finally turned out to be a total ballbuster. Speaking of ballbusters, I’d also just seen the end of what seemed to be a promising relationship, my first in some time. The woman, a theater critic at the paper, had suddenly become unavailable for the life I thought we might start planning together. Turned out she’d met a really cool young actor while writing a fawning piece about a really cool new theater company. I loved New York, but it seemed out of love with me: getting out of town was a damn good idea at the time. It didn’t just seem that way.
I’d married young, divorced at thirty-five, had a 14-year-old son, Jeffrey, who lived with his mother, with Helen, in California. I figured that if I wanted to alter the pattern of my existence, forty was a good age to do it.
I had something in common with Diane Madigan.
With a lot of people in the sovereign state of Florida, a place I now rate as godawful.
It’s one thing to make a drastic change in your life, another to make the wrong change. The wrong choice. It’s a luxury to be able to choose, but there’s an element of self-indulgence involved. And a big choice one makes, therefore, for that reason and others, can sometimes have dire consequences. It can even be fatal.
But how can you know it? How can one predict anything, map out the course of a life and know what road to take, what road may be less traveled, but treacherous?
One is tempted to say it’s all a roll of the dice
Fate.
The philosophical stalker, you could call it. Just try to slam the door and turn it back. Or stop it in its tracks or at least fend it off, delay it, keep it at bay until help comes.
Just try.