CLIVE BENNETT CAVORTED around the room like a demented leprechaun, flashing an evil grin and waving his arms in the air. “This is incredible! The biggest scoop I have come across in thirty years of journalism. This tops everything I’ve covered before—the Civil War, the Golden Spike. Hell, even Lincoln’s assassination. Well, perhaps not Lincoln. I was there, you know. In Ford’s Theater that very night. But this …” He waved the killer’s latest letter with a flourish. “This is absolutely, entirely, and utterly remarkable.”
The editor’s elation echoed through the building, loud enough for the print staff in the basement to hear. Thinking that an angry reader had stormed the newsroom, the printers had surged upstairs, ink-stained fists at the ready, expecting a brawl, only to be confronted by nothing more than the boss pumping his arms in the air as he danced a joyous jig around the room. Clive had always been a volatile character, but no one could recall him being this excited.
“Calm down, Mr. Bennett,” Wendell Smith implored. “You’re going to have a coronary.”
“Let him have his fun,” said Nick, who sat in a corner of the room, basking in his own satisfaction. Despite the deal he’d forged with Wendell, Nick knew full well that he would eventually come to dominate the coverage. They might be sharing a byline tomorrow, but from there on out, Nick would feature as the primary writer.
Even though he would also gain from Ingraham’s murder, Wendell couldn’t understand their elation, an office full of people acting as if they had just struck gold. Unable to keep his tongue, Wendell finally spoke out. “Need I remind you, a man is dead.”
“We’re not gloating over his demise,” said Clive, sweating from his dance and now leaning with one hand against the desk. “We’re simply delighted for ourselves. Don’t you realize what we’ve got here? We’ve won the bloody derby, man! This may be the single most important newspaper event in San Diego history. We’re no longer dealing with a single, paltry local murder, but a story that’ll surely make headlines around the world.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Nick interjected, in fact hoping the story would do just that.
“I’m dead serious,” Clive said, catching his breath and putting on a sober face. “You think this story sold before? Wait until the public gets a load of Act Two. By the end of next week, they’ll have heard of the San Diego Times not just in England and France and all of the other great modern civilizations, but also in the most distant corners of the globe, all the way from Cathay to the Dark Continent.”
Even Nick—with all of his hopes and dreams—thought Clive was putting the horse well before the cart. They hadn’t written the damn story yet. Hadn’t even penned the first word.
Slipping behind his desk, Clive yanked open a drawer and removed a box of cigars. Lighting up, he stared out the window, deep in thought. “We need a name,” he suddenly declared.
“And how do we get that?” asked Nick, not catching on.
Clive whirled around. “Not his real name, you dolt. A nom de plume. An alias. Something dramatic that catches the public’s imagination.”
Nick scoffed at the very thought. “The story is astounding enough already. We don’t need a cheap moniker.”
“Quite the contrary,” said Clive. “A beguiling epitaph can help sell even more papers, earn even more fame, garner even more fortune.”
“How about the San Diego Slasher?” said Wendell, trying to weasel his way into the conversation and the decision-making process. “Or the Bayside Beast?”
“I’m as partial to alliteration as the next fellow,” said Clive. “But it must bear some connection to reality. Our bloke doesn’t slash. And only one of his kills has been along the bay. But you’re getting the hang of it, Wendell. Keep ‘em coming.”
“This is ridiculous,” Nick muttered. “We don’t have to call him anything.”
But Clive adamantly disagreed. “If we don’t, somebody else will. Most likely one of the other local rags. We either name him ourselves, or it’s out of our hands. Besides, all of the great criminals of our day and age have nicknames—Billy the Kid, Dynamite Dick, Black Jack Ketchum.”
Nick grimaced. “Those are all so vulgar.”
“Then how about something classical?” Wendell suggested, taking full advantage of a rare opportunity to side with the boss against Nick.
“Not a bad thought, but what?” asked Clive.
Wendell thought a moment and said, “Hades—Lord of the Underworld?”
But the boss shook his head in disagreement. “Hades was the gatekeeper, a simple public servant, not the one who consigned you to Hell. Wasn’t really evil, was he? Not to mention the fact that a lot of our readers, the more religiously inclined, would balk at our using a word they consider an expletive.”
Clive darted from the office, his two minions following him across the newsroom and down the hall to the editor’s private quarters in the rear.
“Where is it?” Clive mumbled, sifting through the hundreds of books stacked on the floor, tables, and shelves around the room. “Ah, here!” He snatched a volume on ancient mythology, thumbing through the section that listed the myriad deities, and thinking out loud as he scanned the names. “Apollo? He was a bit of a gadfly. Dionysus? A worthless pretty boy. Good old Hermes—patron of thieves and liars. But we’re not dealing with perjury or bank robbery. We’re talking brutal murder and revenge.”
Clive suddenly looked up. “I’ve got it! Nemesis! Whose heavenly portfolio, amongst other things, included retribution and vengeance. ‘The one from whom there is no escape,’” the editor quoted from memory. “That fits our bloke to a tee!”
But Nick shot him down again. “The only problem being that Nemesis was very much a female.”
“You’re testing my patience, boy.”
Nick shrugged. “Simply pointing out a fact.”
“Which I find both helpful and irrelevant for the simple reason that ‘nemesis’ has evolved into a generic term for anyone—male, female, or otherwise—who seeks justice or revenge. Besides,” Clive said flippantly. “Who’s to say our own vigilante is not of the fairer sex.”
“Give me a break, Clive. A woman couldn’t possibly have committed these murders.”
“Balderdash! Nobody has been caught. Nobody has been named. Nobody has been identified. Which makes Nemesis an even more fitting appellation.”
“I find it most appropriate,” said Wendell, butting in again. “And certainly a name our readers will latch on to. As dramatic as we are likely to find.”
“My point exactly,” said Clive. “Nemesis it is!”
Nick could have argued the point till hell froze over, but he knew it a lost cause. Once Clive made up his mind, there was no going back. They could have their silly name. It was still his story, his crime, and very much his killer. And anybody who tried to snatch it away should be prepared for the fight of their life.
Making his way to the newsroom phone, Nick had the exchange operator ring home so that he could inform his wife about all that had transpired this morning.
Roz seemed blasé at first, but Nick lured her with boundless enthusiasm. He spoke to her like a boy telling his mother about a perfect grade in school. And Roz responded like a mother, opening her heart like she hadn’t done in months, letting all the anger and frustration wash away in the wake of a long-overdue outpouring of (honest) emotion from her husband. It reminded her of when they had first met, with Roz swept up in the tide of his passion. True, it was passion for work that had prompted the outburst, but Nick’s yearning to share the triumph with his wife also transcended the telephone line, as if everything he attained was on her behalf.
Nick wouldn’t let her have a word in edgewise until he had finished a long and rambling dissertation on the course of the morning’s events. He paused, almost out of breath.
And Roz whispered into the phone, “Darling, I’m proud of you.”
Fueled by his wife’s accolade, and with Wendell sitting next to him at the typing machine, Nick composed the story in less than an hour. Being largely self-taught, Nick wrote in a peculiar manner. Before committing word to page, he would stare into the middle distance, a sentence forming in his head, and then recite the line out loud as he typed the words. Stare at the air a little more, declaim the next line, and so on until the story ended.
Nick had never been indisposed to drama, especially at Clive’s urging, so he portrayed the newly christened “Nemesis” as a vengeful grim reaper roaming the county in pursuit of justice. A shrewd criminal who carefully plotted every move and meticulously covered his tracks to avoid detection. But Nick also added sympathetic touches. The killer, whoever he might be, seemed to truly believe his bloody deeds filled a void of justice left by loopholes in law and courts. Perhaps his mind was errant and his methods brutal, but his heart was in the right place.
Clive gave the story one last read, changing a word here and there, adding the punctuation that Nick always had a habit of ignoring when he wrote in such a flurry. Finally finished with the text, the publisher added Wendell’s name to the byline and had Smith deliver it to the basement for typesetting, along with the latest letter, published verbatim on page two.
Yet Clive wasn’t quite satisfied. Something seemed to be missing from their coverage, but he couldn’t put his finger on what that might be. He spun around in his chair, staring out the window again. It was dark by now, the plaza lit by the towering arc lamp and light streaming from Horton House, people coming and going from various evening affairs. What in God’s name are we forgetting? Clive asked himself. Then it came to him—a visual. Not of Yankee Jim’s corpse, mind you. One of Elliot Patterson’s photographs had already been chosen for the front page. What Clive actually had in mind was a picture of the killer.
And the fact that no such image existed wasn’t about to thwart him. “Wendell!” he screamed across the newsroom.
The young reporter came trotting up, still out of breath from his jaunt to the basement. “Yes, Mr. Bennett?”
“Do you know where the Canary House is?”
Wendell went flush.
“Do you or don’t you?” barked Clive.
“Yes, sir. I know its location.”
“Good. Because I want you to run down there—and by ‘run’ I do mean go as fast as your scrawny legs will carry you—and fetch a girl named Ada. Big redhead. Bring her back here pronto. You got that?”
Wendell seemed flabbergasted by the request. “Not that I would know, sir, never having frequented that establishment myself, but isn’t one supposed to go there?”
Clive scrunched up his face. “I don’t want to fuck her, you fool. I want her to draw us something. She’s a very fine artist, I’ll have you know.”
Wendell wasn’t about to ask how his boss had discovered the redhead’s artistic bent. So he hurried down to the Stingaree and returned with the voluptuous Miss Ada, who sat in Clive’s office with charcoal and drawing paper. As they watched, she rendered a picture of a Grim Reaper looming over bayside San Diego with the name “Nemesis” inscribed across the bottom of his cassock. Far more than one of Patterson’s crime scene photos, the sketch seemed to embody the threat facing their waterfront burg.
Calling everyone into the newsroom, Clive held the caricature aloft for all to admire. Wendell was predictably outraged by its crassness. Nick seemed strangely disinterested. But everyone else heartily approved. Clive was a big believer in democracy, as long as it coincided with his own convictions, and he was certain the ghoulish illustration—in combination with the story, letter, and photo—would push circulation over the fifteen thousand mark for the first time in the paper’s history. The Times had caught a big one, and they were going to ride it for all its worth.
Dismissing the staff and closing his office door, Clive decided the time was also ripe to take Ada for a ride.