“Keep up the good work, Ryerson! Chicago Beat matters to us at Global One, you know.”
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at that—what a name for the ugliest chunk of glass and steel to go up in Chicago since Trump Tower broke ground.
“I’m happy to hear that, Harold,” Murray said, with an effusiveness that made me wince. “I wanted you to meet Vic here. V. I. Warshawski. She’s one of Chicago’s most skilled criminal investigators.”
Weekes’s brows went up. “Expecting to find murder here?”
“Nope,” I said. “Just the usual graft and corruption, nothing special.”
“Vic has done background work on a lot of my stories,” Murray said hastily. “Last winter’s exposé on war profiteering, for instance.”
Weekes frowned. “I know you thought you had a big scoop there, Ryerson, but it’s always been true that war creates opportunities for the alert.”
I grinned insanely, the little woman ecstatic to be in the presence of power. “For the alert opportunist, I suppose. Other people just have the chance to get their heads blown off.”
There was an uncomfortable silence for a beat, and then Weekes laughed. A smiling woman in a silky red dress, she could be given the benefit of the doubt.
Murray plowed ahead doggedly. “You know the series I’m working on, Madness in the Midwest, on the mentally ill, from the streets to state hospitals’ forensic wings—Vic could add a lot of depth to the series.”
Weekes patted Murray’s arm. “We’ll certainly keep that in mind, Ryerson. If your friend has investigative experience we can probably find a role for her.”
Like Lawlor’s a few minutes earlier, Weekes’s eyes were glazed over. Talking to Murray and his friend was his idea of purgatory. I couldn’t really blame him—the feeling was completely mutual.
The governor of Wisconsin came along and tapped Weekes’s arm. The news king moved on.
“Murray, is that why you invited me to this horror show? To help you with some story about mentally ill criminals?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you tell me you had an agenda?”
“You put up such a song and dance about coming at all, I didn’t feel I could go into it with you,” he blazed back.
That much was true. When Murray called last week, asking me to be his date to tonight’s celebration of Lawlor’s tenth anniversary as GEN’s star, I’d said no without thinking.
“I hate Wade Lawlor,” I protested. “I hate his politics, I hate his molassied voice, and I hate his pretense of being a working-class boy. That fake work shirt makes me throw up every time I drive up the Kennedy. I bet the closest he ever got to a day’s hard labor was paying a neighbor to mow his mother’s lawn when he was a kid.”
“You’d lose,” Murray said. “He comes from some kind of broken home. I’ve seen him weep on camera, over how his dad ran off and left him and his sister to fend for themselves. Success hasn’t just gone to Wade’s head—it’s made him vindictive. My job ain’t so secure that I can dis the network’s golden goose. And I don’t want to go alone.”
“What about all those blond twentysomethings you flaunt anytime I see you in public?” I snapped.
“Are you jealous?”
“More disgusted. Why can’t you act your age?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do here, and you’re not helping. You can rehabilitate me, turn me into a boomer who’s not afraid to show his age,” he wheedled.
“If I could rehabilitate you, Murray, it would be to turn you back into the journalist who won a Pulitzer for White Crime/Black Convict.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I’d wished them back. Murray had done a spectacular series for the Herald-Star on the white youths who bought their coke and meth on the black South and West Sides but who were seldom accused of drug crimes. He’d followed four kids—two black, two white—from the drug scene for a year. At the end of the year, the two white guys were setting off for the east coast to college at Haverford and Princeton; one of the black kids had been sentenced to fifteen years for possession, while the other was dead.
The year after Murray won his Pulitzer, the Global Entertainment Network bought the Star, along with several hundred other papers. Harold Weekes acquired a minor Hollywood studio for its cable potential, moved the company from the outer reaches of LA to Wacker Drive, gutted the reporting staff at Global’s papers, and hired Wade Lawlor to disseminate rumors, innuendo, and outright lies, under the catchy title Wade’s World.
Wade’s World trumpeted the claim that Obama had ordered police to collect Bibles from kids on their way to school. Wade signed on with a group disputing the president’s citizenship.