Murray took me to his cubicle, which wasn’t exactly private space, but no one was at any of the closest desks. “Vic, I’m sorry. The text in my story about Petra and the Malina Foundation got edited in rewrite. If you’d like to see the original as I posted it, I’ll show you.”
His face was still pale, making his freckles and blue eyes stand out as vivid splashes of color in his face. I noticed that his red hair was streaked with gray. So much time had passed since he and I worked on our first story together, corruption in the Knifegrinders union. We not only hadn’t cleaned up the city, we hadn’t even made a dent. Instead, fraud had spread along every corridor of American life and had infected the newsroom.
“I’ll take your word for it. But if you call Petra again, I want her to hang up on you. As soon as she says anything, it’ll go into Weekes’s distortion machine and come out as a claim that she caused the tsunami that hit Japan.”
“I won’t call her.” Murray held up three fingers, the scout salute.
The young woman in leggings came over to his cubicle with mugs. “Hot tea. It’s better than our machine coffee and maybe it’ll help calm you down.”
I accepted the mug meekly.
“I’m Luana Giorgini—in charge of froth. You know, books, music, comics, the stuff that the paper wants to edge out. Every now and then they turn movies or videos over to me.”
“Luana is my only spiritual ally on the editorial side,” Murray added.
“That’s why I’m in charge of froth.” Her small round face didn’t change expression, but Murray laughed.
“You can say anything to Luana that you say to me.”
“Which isn’t much right now,” I said, lips tight.
“Tell me about Wuchnik’s place being tossed,” Murray said.
“Someone had been through it with a sieve.” I described the condition of Wuchnik’s apartment. “They’d broken into his car, too. The one thing I found was his mileage log—whoever cleaned out his car must have dropped it in the dark. I got the log from a couple of kids.”
Murray recovered his color. “Let’s see it, Warshawski.”
“There’s nothing to see,” I said. “He tells where he’s going but not who he’s going to see, or who hired him.”
In the interest of restoring harmony, though, I pulled the photocopied log out of my briefcase and showed it to Luana and Murray. I didn’t point out my special interest in Ruhetal—Murray had a very deep hole to climb out of before I trusted him with much again.
Murray and Luana bent over the photocopies. I leaned back, sipping my tea and reading the cartoons and notices Murray had pinned to the corkboard on his cubicle walls. He had all the predictable Dilbert strips, along with Doonesbury’s Roland Hedley’s spurious reporting.
One wall was devoted to his scrapped series on mental illness, Madness in the Midwest. I leaned forward to read the proposal, which began with nineteenth-century farm women going mad from the isolation of their lives and burning down their farmhouses with themselves and their families locked inside.
He’d also posted the e-mail chain that ended with Weekes telling him that the series was “too narrow, too downbeat for our demographic.”
Murray looked up and saw what I was reading. “Oh, yes. My dead series. I can’t quite let it go.”
He ripped the e-mail from the corkboard and handed it to me. It looked like a good story to me, starting and ending with the veterans on the streets: in 2001, they included 150,000 survivors of Vietnam. In 2010, those numbers had been swelled by 9,000 vets from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In between, Murray had proposed a look at mental health institutions like Ruhetal. Who got treated, who got turned away, who paid the bills. And his segment on “not guilty by reason of mental impairment”: he’d suggested five names to Weekes, three at Ruhetal, two at Elgin. “All these people have been on locked wards for more than twenty years,” he’d written the head of GEN’s news division. “We’re looking at incarceration with no end date and no judicial oversight. Why isn’t this worth a story?”
And Weekes had written back, “Because everyone is glad to see these scum stay locked up. Too bad we can’t do that with the rest of our murderers.”
Murray had written, “Sounds like China. Or Iran.”
Not too surprising that Weekes had canceled the series.
“Did you figure out why he canceled?” I asked. “Was it because of your Iran comment?”
“Nah. He’d already made up his mind by then. He was never very interested, but it was either the segment on homeless Iraq vets—GEN is still pounding their war drums—or the forensic-wing stuff. He doesn’t think mentally ill criminals deserve a sympathetic hearing—he made that clear in the huddle.” Murray scowled in remembered resentment. “Lawlor added some choice sarcasm. It was like being back in eighth-grade gym, with the coach egging the rest of the guys on to bully kids like me who didn’t play football.”
I couldn’t believe I was feeling sorry for Murray, working in that poisonous environment, only half an hour after I’d been ready to kill him.