Cornelius Feldott, assistant Cook County medical examiner, announced this morning that he has assumed management of the department following the sudden illness of Medical Examiner Charles McGarry. Details of McGarry’s illness will not be made public, Feldott said, in respect for McGarry’s privacy, but he said that the illness is not life-threatening and that McGarry is expected to return to head the medical examiner’s office within the next month. ‘Our hopes and wishes are for his complete and speedy recovery,’ Feldott said.
McGarry’s illness comes at a difficult time, as his office is in the midst of assisting the Cook County sheriff’s department in investigating the murders of the Graves sisters and Jennifer Ann Day, and in the re-examination of the killings of Bobby Stemec and Johnny and Anthony Henderson, as announced two days ago by Sheriff’s Deputy Jerome Glet. The status of Richie Fernandez, who, according to witnesses, was arrested as a person of interest in the Graves case by Cook County Sheriff Joseph Lehman in the company of Charles McGarry, remains unknown.
‘Again, Richie Fernandez!’ Aria said, throwing her arms up in mock exasperation.
‘For now, and maybe for quite a while,’ Rigg said.
‘Feldott caught you by surprise with his announcement?’ Aria asked.
‘He gave no hint of taking over when we talked, even going so far as to pretend confusion about where McGarry might be.’
‘And about Beatrice Graves being penetrated?’
‘He didn’t flinch at that, either.’
‘How do we find out if the Day girl was sexually assaulted?’ she asked.
‘She was in the water for a long time. Even if evidence survived, I bet he’d quash it. He wouldn’t want Sex Crimes anywhere around.’
She turned to her keyboard, tapped keys and sent Rigg’s piece off. ‘You can’t say that last business about Richie Fernandez. You have no witnesses now.’
‘Fernandez is a story.’
‘A story that has no corroborating witnesses. You said Greg Theodore is watching you. He’ll sniff out the weakness and crucify you for sloppy reporting.’
‘McGarry is complicit in Fernandez’s disappearance. His hinges are coming loose. That’s why he’s pretending to be sick.’
Her desk phone rang. She picked it up. It was a short conversation, consisting twice of, ‘I’ll tell him.’ She hung up.
‘The Bastion beckons,’ she said.
He hadn’t been back to the Examiner’s headquarters since Donovan exiled him under the shadow of Carlotta Henderson, early the year before. Never as foreboding as the Chicago Tribune’s Gothic tower, as detailed as the Art Deco magnificence of the old Daily News headquarters or as boxily efficient as the former Sun-Times building, the majesty of the six-story, fortress-style brick Bastion always held, for Rigg, the scrappy resoluteness of the city’s third-largest newspaper.
‘Milo!’ Edna, the woman behind the reception desk in the Bastion’s grand marble lobby, smiled. She loved all the Examiner’s reporters.
‘I’m back!’ he said.
‘To stay?’
‘Probably just for minutes. I’m here to see Donovan.’
Her smile disappeared. Things had got steadily worse for print reporters since Rigg’s first day at the paper. Fresh-faced out of Chicago’s Columbia College, the school for scrappy but broke aspiring journalists, he’d realized only when he came through the doors that first day that he’d never thought to ask what his salary was going to be. It had been of no matter; he was going to be a reporter at Chicago’s third-largest paper and that was all that counted. Not that many years had passed since then, but they’d been years of brutal transformation, and, by now, Edna must have been seeing reporters leaving in greater numbers than ever before.
He got out of the elevator at the newsroom, three floors shy of his destination. At eleven fifteen, the floor should have resonated with keyboard clacking, shouted snippets of conversations and muttered profanity. Maybe long gone were the days of ‘Hat and coat!’ – meaning, Get your ass out on the street – or ‘Get me rewrite!’ but there should have been more modern incantations of a live, bustling newsroom crackling across the low-walled cubicles. But the third floor, the reporters’ floor, was now a ghost town. Half the cubicles were empty and the other half was occupied by bent-over people speaking in whispers, as if to avoid notice that they were speaking at all. There was no mystery to their futures. More lay-offs were coming – there at the Examiner, but also at the Trib and the Sun-Times. People no longer read the ink of the news; more and more, they wanted less and less of it, and they wanted that in tiny bits on screens that they could delete in an instant if it was too upsetting or demanded too much concentration, bits like Rigg himself had been reduced to writing.
He walked through the newsroom, stopping at almost every occupied cubicle with a smile. He knew them all and they knew him. He’d never ruled this room, but he’d been a force at one time, before Carlotta.
Several people stood in front of a giant electronic screen that showed the day’s online stories and the number of hits each had received. It was the new age of readership accounting, assessing which stories drew attention – and, as Rigg and everyone else on that floor knew, which reporters didn’t draw much attention and were likeliest to be axed in the next round of lay-offs.
He paused in front of his old cubicle in the corner. It was still empty, never filled.
A rumpled, gray-haired fellow in corduroy pants and a plaid shirt walked up. He was the Examiner’s City Hall reporter, and was, he often proclaimed, too old to fire. ‘What the hell have you done now?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Meeting with Donovan on the sixth floor,’ Rigg said.
Those that had turned at the sound of their voices frowned. No one went up to Donovan’s floor simply to chat.
The rumpled fellow stuck out his hand, no doubt in farewell. ‘Ah, hell, Milo.’
Rigg took the stairs up one floor and poked his head in at the advertising and sales department. No matter how good any newspaper was editorially, it was nothing without the money to pay for its people, ink, paper and Internet sites. The Examiner’s fourth floor had always been filled with hotshots, snappy dressers talking fast on the phone to potential advertisers. Now, the fourth floor was even more deserted than the newsroom. The battle had been lost; the advertisers had gone away. A woman he didn’t recognize sat in a cubicle halfway across the floor. She didn’t look up.
He climbed the last two flights. There were no cubicles on the top floor, just polished old oak secretarial desks and private offices behind polished old oak doors. Most of the doors were closed on empty offices. Donovan’s cost-cutting had decimated his own executive floor as well.
The publisher’s office was in the corner. Donovan was lanky, narrow-faced and had the small eyes of a ferret. Anecdotes abounded about the driven bastard who’d made great wealth in commercial real estate. He was an everyday tennis player with his own key to a downtown club so he could practice his serves at six in the morning. He drove hyper-expensive Porsches that his secretary traded in for new ones every six months and, when she wasn’t doing that, she took frequent cab rides to the bank, because Luther Donovan wouldn’t touch paper money unless it had never been touched before.
But, nowadays, word was that Luther Donovan was scrambling for any kind of money. The sense of invincibility that had taken him past real-estate development into newspaper publishing, thinking his roughshod managerial style and relentless cost-cutting would turn the teetering Chicago Examiner into a profitable business, like every financial endeavor he’d approached before, had gotten him into deep trouble. He and his minority investors were getting creamed by the Examiner’s falling circulation and rising printing costs.
Donovan’s door was open. His secretary, who’d been with the paper through three publishers, two of whom had cared not one whit for tennis, Porsches and pristine paper money, managed to force a smile and waved for him to go right in.
Unlike the venerable old oak paneling and furniture that was everywhere else on that historic sixth floor, Donovan’s inlaid walls had been painted over in flat white enamel and a desk had been brought in consisting of two bright chrome pillars supporting a smoked glass top. The computer screen on the adjacent, matching glass and chrome table was blank.
‘Milo,’ Donovan said without inflection, not glancing up from the sheet he was reading. Donovan’s rudeness was a tactic, a delay meant to be unnerving and give the publisher an advantage. No doubt it had worked with contractors, listing agents and the other denizens of his real-estate world, but Rigg didn’t see much point in allowing it to work on him. His career had already plummeted to the Pink.
‘Luther,’ he said, sitting down and crossing his legs with what he hoped was the nonchalance of a man about to doze.
Donovan finally looked up. ‘Back in the game?’ The publisher was a man of millions of dollars, but only a few words.
‘The usual at the Pink.’
‘More than that.’
Rigg shrugged. ‘Car wash openings and murders. Such is the news.’
‘Your treatment of them is off-putting.’
‘Which? The car washes or the murders?’ Rigg said.
The great man did not frown at the sarcasm. ‘This, in particular,’ he said. He turned to his computer, tapped a key to bring the screen to life and began to read aloud. ‘“The status of Richie Fernandez, who, according to witnesses, was arrested as a person of interest in the Graves case by Cook County Sheriff Joseph Lehman in the company of McGarry, remains unknown.”’
It was a surprise and a delight. He’d thought Aria had deleted the offending last sentence.
‘Part of the big story,’ Rigg said. ‘Lehman and McGarry busted Fernandez, but never booked him. That’s important.’
‘They deny it and, according to your boss, Mrs Gamble, you have no corroborating witnesses to the supposed Fernandez arrest.’
‘Lehman made them disappear.’
‘You know this?’
‘I conclude this.’
‘I say again: you have no witnesses.’
‘To which I say again: Lehman made them disappear. He’s dirty on this. So is McGarry, which is why he’s pretending to be sick. He needs to be squeezed.’ Rigg paused, knowing he was about to do wrong, and then went ahead anyway. ‘I don’t know the man, Luther, but I hear you do.’
It was a feint and it worked. Donovan’s face flushed red. ‘Only from business dealings. Real-estate partnerships, trade associations and the like.’
The desk phone buzzed, no doubt a prearranged signal from Donovan’s secretary that the time allotted for an annoying pebble like Rigg was up. ‘McGarry is to be removed from your reporting, do you understand?’ Donovan said.
‘You’re the publisher.’
‘We don’t want a flare-up,’ Donovan said.
‘There are no Carlotta Hendersons here, Luther. There was no Carlotta Henderson the last time, either.’
‘And there is no McGarry now, because there are no witnesses to Fernandez.’
Donovan’s phone buzzed again, insistent. Rigg got up.
‘Be wise, Milo,’ Donovan said, without bothering with the pretense of picking up his phone to a dead line. He’d turned back to the sheet he’d been studying when Rigg came in. The sheet was filled with numbers. Likely, they were bad numbers.
‘Wisdom – of course,’ Rigg said, and stepped out, but it was way too late for that.