Invasion of Privacy

tragedy. There was even a grainy photo of Quentin’s widow, a flight attendant, at the cemetery ceremony following his suicide four years earlier. The story and caption gave her first name as “Edith,” but she wore no veil, and the photo captured her lower lip curling as she concentrated on something at the graveside.
    Just the way Edie did, drawing a beer behind the bar at The Tides.
    Aware of my concentration on the screen, Giselle said, “Would you like a printout of this one?”
    “Please.”

    “Mo?”
    “Now what?”
    The cigar was in his mouth but dead again. “I just wanted to thank you for all the help.”
    “Don’t mention it.”
    “One more thing?”
    He made a ritual of taking the cigar out of his mouth. “John, maybe you ought to put me on the payroll, you know?”
    “Last one, promise.”
    “What is it?”
    “You know anybody on the Brockton paper?”
    Mo Katzen turned the cigar to stare at its unlit end, as if seeing it for the first time. “Not since Chester Snedeker died. It’s an interesting story, though. You got a minute to hear about Chet?”

22

    A n hour later, I left the Herald’s building, the air temperature feeling like seventy and still putting the he to October on the calendar. Brockton being closer than Plymouth Mills, I got on the Southeast Expressway to Route 128 and eventually Route 24. Three miles after taking the second Brockton exit, I found the newspaper where Norman El-mendorf had worked, housed in an old granite elephant that could pass for a public library.
    Locking the Prelude, I stuck under my arm the portfolio briefcase I’d been using. Inside the building’s front doors was a fiftyish guy wearing a blue security uniform who couldn’t have looked more bored if he’d been snoring. I showed him my identification, saying I was there to do a routine check on a former employee now applying for a job with a client of mine.
    The guard picked up a telephone, dialed three digits, and passed my information on to somebody named “Betty.” Nodding and hanging up, he said, “Take a seat. Somebody’ll be right with you.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Hot as blazes for October, isn’t it?”
    “Global warming,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Never mind.”
    A middle-aged woman in a hound’s-tooth suit came through the door to the right of the guard and introduced herself as Betty without giving a last name. She asked me to follow her.
    On the other side of the door, the city room wasn’t exactly bedlam because it wasn’t exactly populated. Three college-aged kids huddled around a single computer monitor, the cables twisting and lifting up through the ceiling like Jack’s beanstalk. One woman Betty’s age played hunt-and-peck at another terminal, muttering under her breath. A dozen more computer stations were empty, four of them apparently cleaned out.
    At the back of the city room, Betty knocked once under a brown plastic plaque that said MANAGING EDITOR, then opened the door for me without getting an answer from inside. I went through, she closing behind me.
    The man at the desk swung around from another computer screen, some henscratched notes in a small spiral notebook next to the keyboard. “And you’d be?”
    “John Cuddy.” As he stood, I extended my right hand to shake.
    Taking it, he said, “Mike Yoder. Sit.”
    Yoder was about five-eight and shaped like a pear, the sloping shoulders under a V-neck sweater a good foot narrower than the middle of him. His thinning hair was gray and his hands were heavily veined, but he had a twinkle in the eye that made him seem younger than the sixty or so I’d have estimated.
    Dipping into the portfolio, I took out the PERSONNEL RECORD REQUEST—also thanks to my wizard from the copy center—with a version of Norman Elmendorf’s signature at the bottom. “I’m looking into the work background of a former employee here.”
    I passed the request to Yoder. He glanced at the signature area before reading the rest of it. Then he reached over to the telephone next to him and pressed a button. The door opened almost immediately, and Yoder said, “Betty, get me Norm Elmendorfs personnel file, will you?”
    A hesitation, then, “Right away,” and the door closed again.
    Yoder said, “Mind if I ask what this is all about?”
    “Mr. Elmendorfs applied for a job with a client of mine.”
    “I got that much from security via Betty.”
    “Not quite. I didn’t give the guard or Betty Mr. Elmendorfs name.”
    “No,” said