C H A P T E R • 8
I told Adrianne, the paper’s current editor, I had a briefing to give her at the copy machine.
“This better be good. I’ve got work to do,” she said.
“It is. But you need to tell me how good.”
When I handed her the first copy, she said, “I must remind you this infighting at the bank has been going on for some time. Cecelia has been giving Sam bits for her society column. But your father usually wouldn’t let me use the best stuff. He said the bank’s new president needed room to find his way and make his changes.”
I waited while she read. “Damn. This is good,” she said.
“Give me some of these lists to call when you get it sorted out,” I said.
“Damn straight. You’re going to call the A-list. Charlie Washington’s movie star kid will get the newspaper inside some of these offices where the rest of us can’t go. I’ll give you the questions you need to ask.”
The ego that attached me to my newspaper must have put a face on me.
She cleared her throat.
“Not that you don’t know what to ask, but you haven’t been here reporting for several years. There are some new contexts you wouldn’t know about.”
“Okay. While you’re doing that, I’m going to write a eulogy. I saw Cecilia get hit and I’ve got pictures.”
“Just make it short. This ain’t the New York Times.”
“It sure the hell ain’t,” I said. “But, Adrianne, you’ll see, there is a hell of a story you can report using the bank information. And I think it makes sense for me to report about how we got the information. In fact, dividing the story between us will keep it clean. We can leave the conjecture to Samantha’s gossip column. And you all are going to have plenty to do next week. I don’t see any list of loans.”
I tried to say it in a way that wouldn’t set her off.
It set her off.
“You have a helluva nerve. News judgment isn’t something that passes down through the genes. And I know you need to get out of the way and let people who know how to do it run this newspaper, or you’ll be lucky to get ads for some of those raised-from-the-dead mystics.”
When she turned and left the office, I could hear her heels clicking against the tiled corridor. She was probably on her way to the Candlelight III, the bar down the avenue, and would be back to work with a vengeance, propelled by jet fuel. So what? I certainly didn’t drive her to drink.
Samantha was watching with a straight face but dancing eyes.
“How’s your gossip column coming?” I asked her. “And what’s all this paper? I thought you just listen at doors and sit in bars to get the stuff you use.”
“It’s a society column. And I’m not above catching the news on the fly. But writing Kiss and Tell is like making greens. You can’t imagine how much information it takes to come up with those little bits of news.”
Readers called Kiss and Tell, by Sam, her silly column of social events and name dropping, “What the Hell?” because inevitably, when reading, you’d find yourself saying, What the hell . . . I thought so and so was dead, or I thought they would be up to something else by now, or What the hell are those two doing together?
“This just turned into news,” she said with a gotcha voice. “Cecelia and Reverend Garrison broke up.”
“That doesn’t even sound like good gossip. But I’ve got a quote for you.” I read from my notebook: “The great tragedy is that we will not now be able to get to the truth behind the lies and innuendo surrounding Cecelia’s relationship with the bank and with the people who love her.”
“Thanks. That’s a good one. I’ll add the quote.” She was beaming. It takes a gossip columnist to love bad news as much as Samantha does.
“And there’s also this.” Samantha held up an artist’s rendering. “They’re going to build a movie theater on 125th Street.”
“Where on 125th?”
“Either Eighth or Lenox. There’s some confusion. Mostly I’m hearing Eighth, Frederick Douglass Boulevard.”
“Your society column is where your movie theater belongs. I’ve seen drawings for years of glitzy towers in Harlem and they never got built.”
“The drawing will look good on the page,” she said.
When Adrianne returned, she headed to the back without a word. I saw her through the open door.