Yesterday's News

raised my glass to his and clinked. “To Jane.”
    He nodded. “To Jane.”
    “You said, ‘loved one’ just now.”
    “I did?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Well, I guess I did love her, in a way. You love all the new ones, you know.”
    “How do you mean?”
    Peete lowered the drink and his voice. “The new ones come in so full of the mission, the mission that took them through journalism school and into the business itself. ‘To inform and thus protect.’ It takes a while for it to wear off, but on some it becomes the messiah complex.”
    “Liz Rendall said the same thing.”
    “Ah, a point of agreement between Tin Lizzy and me. I should note it for my biographer.”
    “You figure the complex is what Jane had?”
    “Good sir, after enough years and cases of the hundred proof, figuring doesn’t enter into it. You can almost smell it, like the scent a mother discerns from a puppy in her litter. The problem is, Jane had the fire without the emotional stability that allows some to function, indeed succeed, with and through it.”
    “You ever have it?”
    Peete laughed. “You behold the rarest of the rare, a former addict cured of that particular affliction, though some would argue the cure is worse than the disease. Those who would so argue, however, would be wrong. Dead wrong. No, there is nothing worse than to see the world clearly and suspect, nay be certain, that you, and you alone, can improve upon it.”
    “Speaking of certainties, I thought you told me you never drove anymore?”
    “You may have formed that impression.”
    “Somebody else told me they’ve seen your VW around town.”
    Peete slurped, recalled how much he liked the stuff, and drank deeper. “There are a few days, here and there, when I feel up to motoring myself about. Not many, and never at night, if Jane’s death was where you were heading.”
    Switching off, I said, “I met with Schonsy the other day.”
    “Ah, and how is he enjoying his well-earned pasturing?”
    “A hard man to read.”
    Peete gestured to the bartender, pinging a fingernail against our nearly empty bottle. To me, he said, “Tell me, which of the many faces did he turn toward your sun?”
    “What?”
    “Was he ‘Schonsy: The meanest sonofabitch in the valley,’ ‘Schonsy: The counselor rabbi,’ ‘Schonsy: The picaresque rascal/hero,’ or what?”
    “Thought you said you didn’t know him all that well?”
    “I don’t. But Schonsy is an example of a certain species, much like Jane was. I have observed other such specimens at length. Marvelous creatures to study.”
    “The Schonsy I saw was a battered old man, confined to a wheelchair and trying to be upbeat.”
    “That’s what I mean. Another facet. The truly great cops can sense a scene, just like the truly great actors. They come upon a situation, and often an audience, and trot out just the right impersonation to match the circumstance.”
    I said, “Ida told me that Jane got her job on the Beacon through a friend.”
    “Could be. Often happens that way.”
    “Any idea who the friend might be?”
    “No. She never said anything about it to me.”
    “Apparently the friend was from a Florida paper.”
    “That could be also. A lot of us move around in this business, Jane more than most for someone so young.”
    The Smirnoff arrived. I said, “You know anybody I could talk to on any Gainesville papers?”
    “Singular, not plural.”
    “Sorry?”
    “I believe you’ll find Gainesville has but one daily, though God knows even the Messenger may have competition by now. That part of the country’s gained a lot of population recently. Undoubtedly some weeklies as well.”
    “Yes, but do you know anybody there?”
    “Probably. I’ve been around more than most, too. Problem is, I wouldn’t remember them, and they’d think ill of me, so a letter of introduction wouldn’t advance you much.”
    Peete drained his glass, cracking the new bottle. “Join me?”
    “No. I’ve got things to do. Final question?”
    “As many as you like. I’m not going anywhere.”
    “Peete, what do you think happened, really?” Peete measured out another triple, siphoning half of it. He set the glass down. “Charlie Coyne and Jane Rust, you mean?”
    “That’s what I mean.”
    “I think a little shit living on borrowed time got knifed. I think Jane had as much to do with causing that as she did the Johnstown Flood. And, I think her blindness to her own insignificance so altered that delicate balance we