Yesterday's News

measuring a hundred feet wide and twice as long. Pillars rose from the linoleum floor to the high ceiling. The ubiquitous computer cables dropped from ragged holes to most of the fifty or so desks in the area, each with a terminal and screen. An unabridged dictionary lay open on a pedestal stand under a large mural map of Nasharbor’s part of the county. There were maybe thirty men and women talking on phones or clacking keyboards, a life-sized Bavarian clock gone mad. From one corner, a police scanner squawked like an electronic parrot. Altogether, it was just about quiet enough to hear a bomb drop.
    “The city room,” said Arbuckle, as he led me into an interior office whose only window looked out onto the bustle of the people I watched. He closed the door behind me and threw himself into a desk chair without telling me to have a seat. I took one anyway. “Now,” he said, “exactly what do you want here?”
    “I understand Jane Rust died last night. I’d like to know what happened.”
    “Talk to the cops.”
    “I’m talking to you.”
    “We think it’s kind of bad taste to dwell on suicide. Unless it’s somebody prominent, we don’t even identify the cause of death in the obit.”
    “Bad taste.”
    “That’s right.”
    “She was one of your reporters. One of your own.”
    “She was...“he stopped for a moment, then said, “she came to see you, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    “About the confidential source thing, right?”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Well, she probably told you more about it than she told me, but what she told me was screwy enough.” Arbuckle rearranged some papers on his desk. It ran Mo Katzen’s work space a close second in appearance. “Jane wants to do a story, no, a series of stories, on this kiddie porn thing. I have her on the Redevelopment Authority project, and she isn’t giving me shit on that. But Jane had this idea, no, this obsession, that the police here knocked off this scumbag source she had. Only she wouldn’t talk about the source at story conference or staff meetings. She wouldn’t tell me the guy was her source until after he buys the farm, and even then she won’t come clean on things that don’t make any sense at all.”
    “Like what?”
    “Not the way it works, pal. I gave you a little, now you give me a little. Jane wanted to hire you on her own nickel, that’s her business. She’s dead now, and I want to know why you’re here when she isn’t around anymore to pay you.”
    I considered it. “Because you figure I’m trying to get the paper to foot the bill for keeping me on the investigation.”
    “Jesus, now why didn’t I think of that?”
    “At two in the afternoon she wanted me to look into what she believed was a murder conspiracy. Then she ends up dead that night. Sound like the way of nature to you?”
    “The way of... listen, let me tell you some things, maybe you’ll get the point.” He took a deep breath, let it out exaggeratedly. “Jane was a lightweight, a beginner who wasn’t going to get much better. She had these fantasies, romantic fantasies, of what the newspaper business is like. Exposes, dramatic disclosures, Woodward and Bernstein. Am I getting through to you?”
    “She was unrealistic.”
    “Gold star. She was ridiculous. We hired her on as a Gee-Ay, a general assignment reporter. She’d bounced around too much, paper to paper, for somebody only a couple years out of school. I should have started her in Lifestyles covering store openings and women’s stuff, but a couple people liked her, said give her a chance, so I did. Should have had my head examined.”
    “How’d she get involved in the porno thing if she was so unreliable?”
    “Don’t remind me. She was covering a Saturday night, skeleton crew. The weekend editor’s trying to get lines on two fires and a vehicle fatality, so he sends her out to check on this raid. Then she can’t think about anything else but that she’s going to protect our fair city from the purveyors of kiddie porn panting at the gates. Obsessive, like I said.”
    “The source, his name was Charlie Coyne?”
    “So I’m told.”
    “This Coyne character does end up dead.”
    “This Coyne character was a slug with the life expectancy of a thirteenth-century pickpocket. He hung out down on The Strip. Coyne was lucky to live as long as he did, the kind of people he probably crossed down there.”
    “How did Jane Rust die?”
    “Preliminary says