capital. Margaux Clinton. Sixteen.Runaway from Eugene.” He held his pen frozen in midair. “Who are they? What led them astray? We’ve also got three victims.” He didn’t have their pictures on his board. “Let’s wrap them into a story about the victimization of the homeless—bum fights, violence against transients, et cetera.
“And, obviously, I think the time has come to examine our cultural obsession with Gretchen Lowell.”
Susan looked around the room. It was neat by newspaper-office standards. A New York Yankees pennant on the wall.An Absence of Malice poster. A framed copy of the Oregon Herald from the day Ian was born (1963—God, he was old). And two waist-high stacks of newspapers. On a bulletin board on the wall, next to a five-year-old press release announcing his Pulitzer win, Ian had tacked up a quote that he’d scrawled on a piece of copy paper. “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why”—Bernard Baruch. Next to that was a cartoon from The New Yorker of a guy who was supposed to be Archie Sheridan sitting at a bar. The bartender was handing him a drink and saying, “Gretchen Lowell wants to buy you a beer.”
“I know the answer,” Susan said.
Ian, who had been going on about the role of the antihero in society, stopped talking and looked down at her, annoyed.
“I know the answer,” Susan said again.
“Excuse me?” Ian said.
“We’re the ones who did it,” Susan said. “It was us.” The walls at the Herald were paper thin, and everyone could hear everything anyone said over a whisper. She didn’t care. “We glamorized Gretchen Lowell,” Susan said. “We made her into a celebrity.”
Ian remained perfectly motionless, pen still aloft. He was always perfectly motionless when he was pissed. Susan didn’t care. She had a hole in her cheek and Archie was missing and she was at a stupid story meeting and they were all going to be laid off anyway. “There are people out there who think she’s a hero,” she said. She
looked around at all of them. Sitting on the floor, leaning awkwardly against the wall. Derek sat in one of the chairs. Derek almost never got a chair. Susan could only imagine how early he’d gotten there to get one. And why? No one wanted to be there. This was a joke.
Susan uncrossed her legs and stood up. “They maintain fan sites,” she said. “They update her Wikipedia page. They write fan fiction about her. The audio of the nine-one-one call she made when she turned herself in? Someone remixed it and made a music video. You can watch it on YouTube. There are Tshirts with her face on them that say ‘I “heart” the Beauty Killer.’ ” She got her foot in one boot, and then pulled on the other one. “Not just Tshirts. Baby onesies. Esquire magazine put her in their ‘Women We Love’ issue last year. I put her name into eBay and I found someone selling a set of scalpels they claimed Gretchen had used to slice someone up. The bidding was up to nine hundred dollars.”
She stood there, nose running, bandage on her cheek. She was so fired. She was beyond fired. She would be blacklisted. But she couldn’t stop herself. It all just came blubbering out. “We put all that out there,” she said, flailing a hand. “Story after story after story.The same stale crap.Anything to have an excuse to run her picture, because everyone knows that her picture increases the newsstand pickup by twenty-five percent. So when there wasn’t news, we found other reasons to write about her. ‘How to Make a Gretchen Lowell Halloween Costume.’ ” She forced a laugh and wiped her nose with her wrist. “I wrote that one.”
Ian capped his pen and set it on his desk. He did it with a little too much emphasis, and it rolled across the desk and off the front of it and dropped to the carpet. No one made a move to pick it up for him. No one moved at all.
“We are in the business of selling ads,” Ian said. “We can charge more for our ads if we sell more papers. Gretchen Lowell sells papers.
The Baltimore Sun.The ChicagoTrib. The L.A. Times. Their newsrooms have been gutted. You want to take a buyout? Or do you want to write a story lots of people will read so the ad department can go to Starbucks and talk them into running quarter-page ads in our dying little medium? Because you can either sell Frappuccino ads, or you can sell Frappuccinos. So do you want to be a newspaper reporter, or do you want to be a barista?”
“I want to be a journalist,” Susan said. It sounded absurd even as she said it. Someone leaning against the wall smirked.
“Then write me a story about why you were treated for a puncture wound in the Produce District at two
A.M. this morning. Then write me seventy-five inches on our cultural obsession with Gretchen Lowell. You can put in everything you just said.”
“Seventy-five inches?” Susan said.
“Do you think you can fill it?” Ian asked.
“Absolutely,” Susan said.
“Then go, get out of here,” Ian said.
She looked at Ian. Maybe he wasn’t a total asshole, after all.
One of the other reporters raised his hand. “Can I go?” he said.
“Don’t even think about it,” Ian said.
Susan backed out of the room and closed the door behind her before Ian could change his mind.
C H A P T E R 50