Twenty-Six

I arrive in the newsroom to let Stoogan catch a glimpse of my unconcerned, I-have-everything-under-control-and-still-look-marvelous face, then immediately detour to the morgue before he can pick up the phone and summon me to his office.

Lulu brightens at seeing me.

“The newsroom is buzzing over your FOK note, Dix,” she says.

I’m puzzled. “Why?”

“You’re our shining star, sweetie. If you can’t tell the publisher to stick his notes where the sun don’t shine, what chance do the rest of us have?”

I grunt. “If they’re looking for Norma Rae, they need to get their eyes tested. I have all the leadership qualities of an expired corner store sandwich. Hell, I don’t even like most of the newsroom.”

“So you’re still doing the Father’s Day piece?” Lulu’s painted eyebrows arch to new heights.

“Of course,” I say with a smile. “But that doesn’t mean the publisher will get exactly what he wants.”

Lulu sticks her tongue in her cheek and makes it pop, while her eyes sparkle mischievously. “Uh-huh. See, you don’t have to be a leader to inspire, you just have to remain true to you.”

“Well, I don’t know how else to be, but if I was recruiting for J-school, I certainly wouldn’t pick me as the poster child.”

“Of course not,” Lulu agrees. “You’d want somebody sexy.” She strikes a hooker pose. “Like me.”

We both grin until I say, “You know they’d be more likely to put Mary Jane on the poster with the slogan Journalism: It’s not that hard anymore.”

Lulu erupts into such a loud gale of laughter that she has to sit down, while several people in the newsroom across the hall stand up at their desks to see what is going on.

After calming down and giving me heck for wrecking her eye makeup, Lulu asks, “So what can I do for you?”

I hand her a piece of paper with an address written on it. “I want blueprints for this building,” I say. “I need to know the layout of every floor, fire exits, any recent renovations, the works.”

“And this is for your FOK note?”

I shrug. “The story has become a little more complicated than I counted on. How soon can you have the plans?”

Lulu glances at the clock. “I have a friend at City Hall who can sweet talk the engineers in Planning. End of day?”

“Perfect. If I’m not back, leave them on my desk.”

“Count on it, but I have something else for you, too.”

Lulu hands me a large brown envelope with a waxy, waterproof coating that looks like it’s been stuck behind an outhouse for a few decades.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“The photos from that funeral that you asked me to dig out from the archives. I also found the photographer. His card is inside, although I tried his phone number and it was disconnected.”

I beam. “This is brilliant. I could kiss you.”

“If I wasn’t a straight woman, I’d take you up on that.”

A witty retort raises its hand from the back row in my brain and begins to call “Ooh, ooh, ooh”, but I ignore it. There’s a good reason it’s in the back row.

“My loss,” I say instead.

I turn around to make my exit, but the doorway is blocked by Ishmael’s nemesis.

“Hey, boss,” I say. “I was just coming to see you.”

The look on Stoogan’s puffy white face says he doesn’t believe me.

If I wasn’t lying, I might be insulted.

After reassuring Stoogan that I have everything in hand and he shouldn’t give the cover away to one of Mary Jane’s sex-themed masterpieces of investigative spanking journalism, I slide into my office chair and open the waxy envelope.

Inside are half a dozen photographs, a creased business card that looks as if every corner has been used to remove kernels of corn from between somebody’s teeth, and a rectangular cardboard sleeve.

The photos had originally been in color, but newspapers never aim for museum quality when they’re only one day away from lining a birdcage. The pre-digital lab techs were trained to print the best images circled on a contact sheet and get them to the photo editor ASAP. So long as the image lasted long enough to make it into print, the editors could care less about historical value.

Thus, the photos are cracked, faded, and water damaged. Superimposing my memory of the newspaper clipping that showed Krasnyi Lebed as a pallbearer at the funeral of the man he replaced as boss, I can tell these were shot at the same funeral, but the poor quality makes even that much a deductive leap.

I open the cardboard sleeve to find the film negatives stuck together in a celluloid blob. Useless.

With a sigh I push the envelope away and close my eyes to think. What was I really hoping to find? A concrete connection between Joseph Brown and Krasnyi Lebed, the Red Swan, of course. But I already have that, don’t I? Bailey told me her father was doing a job for Lebed when he disappeared, and the tea house maitre d’, Mikhail, said Brown—if he’s alive—has evidence that could bring down the Red Swan.

The trouble is that every question leads to another question; to write a story, I need answers.

I pick up the cardboard sleeve again and notice the date penciled in the corner. It’s faded but still legible.

I pull my own notepad out of my back pocket and write it down. The year of the funeral is the same year Joe Brown went missing—the same year that Lebed came into full control of the city’s Russian mob.

Could Brown have been more than he seemed?

Instead of being an underling, could he have been an equal? A threat to Lebed’s throne, even? If so, he would surely have been one of the pallbearers.

I need a better look at the funeral photographs. I also need to know the exact date when Brown went missing, and the only person who accurately knows that information is Bailey.