Flat-screen monitors on the walls showed competing networks as well as GEN’s own local and national output. GEN’s national monitor was on commercial break; the local station was showing a fire at a South Chicago factory. On the CNN screen, rioters in Ivory Coast were throwing things at soldiers. On yet another monitor, I could see the pulsing green of worldwide stock indices. As I watched, the Dow went down and the fire turned to a commercial for an anti-anxiety drug.
I was turning to follow Murray to his cubicle when Wade Lawlor appeared on the screen that was airing GEN’s national programs. And in a pop-up window to his left, I saw my own face.
I was so stunned that I stopped where I was. “How do I turn up the sound on this thing?” I called out.
Murray was out of earshot, but the smokers had come up the stairs behind me. One of them handed me a set of earphones and asked which channel I wanted to listen to.
“Lawlor,” I said grimly.
He looked from the screen to me and did a double take. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
“I believe it is, and I’d like to know what the King of Slime is saying.”
The smoker pushed a button on the earphone control, and Wade Lawlor’s voice filled my head.
“I met Warshawski at my tenth-anniversary party last Saturday. I thought she was just a friend and collaborator of one of my colleagues on the print side, Murray Ryerson, but I see now her mission is to bring illegal aliens into this country and take jobs away from hardworking Americans like you and me. She’s teamed up with our own favorite Communist, Chame Salanter, to protect illegals at the Malign Foundation.”
A cartoon picture of the Malina Foundation building covered in oozing sores appeared on the screen. The camera zoomed in on the pustules. Each had a little message: Communists; Nazis; illegals; drugs; disease; crime.
“The billionaire invited her to dinner at his Gold Coast club, which must be where they hatched their plot. Of course, Warshawski’s own mother was an illegal, just like Salanter, so I guess she knows what she’s talking about.”
Salanter and I had been Photoshopped to appear arm in arm on the steps of the Parterre Club. How had Lawlor known we were there? I didn’t have time to worry about that little question; he was moving on to his main attack, his voice like syrup mixed with acid.
“Warshawski has a reputation as a private eye, just like the guy she found dead in a cemetery last Saturday night. I was celebrating my tenth anniversary of being able to bring the truth to you, my good friends and loyal listeners, and she was in a cemetery doing—what?
“I’ve looked into her record. She supports the ‘underdog,’ so-called. Well, I am sick and tired of bleeding hearts shoring up underdogs.”
He leaned forward into the camera, spit flecking his lips. “My own sister was murdered by one of those ‘underdogs’ when we were teenagers. Magda was seventeen, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
The camera gave us a close-up of the tears spilling out of the corners of Lawlor’s eyes, and then a photo insert of Magda Lawlor. Like Wade, she had thick black hair, cut in the style that Madonna made popular in the eighties.
“I was three years younger and I adored her. My wife knows however much I love her, I’ll never feel as close to any other woman as I did to Magda. They found my sister’s body in Tampier Lake. One of these underdogs, these mental incompetents that Warshawski bleeds all over, had murdered her, strangled her, and dumped her in the water, as if she were a used condom. I would have killed him myself if I’d known they wouldn’t give him the death penalty. I’ll never get over Magda’s death, but Warshawski is one of the people who protected her murderer.”
I felt as though my legs had turned to cement. Lawlor went on and on, and I stood there taking it.
When a smooth female voice finally said that “Wade’s World will return after these messages,” I couldn’t even lift my arms to remove the earphones.
Murray appeared behind me and took the headset away. His face was ashen. “Jesus Christ, V. I.—I had no idea that was on tap.”
23.
A REPORTER’S LOT IS NOT A HAPPY ONE
THE TRIO OF SMOKERS HAD STAYED WITH US IN THE HALL, and another fifteen or twenty people had drifted out of the newsroom to watch. Someone had turned on the sound so that everyone could hear it. At the commercial break, they turned to look at me with the same expression people have for plague victims: pity mixed with fear that it might be catching.
“He attacked Gabriella,” I said to Murray. “He is such a low and loathsome piece of bottom-feeding, scum-sucking garbage that he slandered my mother.”
Murray put an arm around me. “He attacked you way worse. Or doesn’t that count?”
I tried to smile. “I think it’s so shocking I can’t quite look at it head-on. This is what Sophy Durango deals with every day. And Chaim Salanter. There must be some way to stop him.”
“Second Amendment remedies,” someone in the news crowd said. Everyone laughed, that kind of raucous laugh you give as an antidote to shock.