“She doesn’t have a blog, Wade,” Weekes said. “She’s just yanking your chain.”
“All of which proves my point,” I said. “You guys have an unhealthy interest in me. And you apparently kept an equal interest in Miles Wuchnik. They wondered over at Crawford, Mead how you knew that Wuchnik sometimes worked for some of their lawyers.”
“How do you—” Lawlor began, but Weekes cut him off.
“We have a lot of tipsters,” he said. “People hear something, see something, they know that we give away fifty dollars for every tip that makes it on air.”
“So someone thought it was newsworthy that Miles Wuchnik worked for a law firm?” I lifted my brows.
“You’d be surprised at what people send in, and sometimes the oddest tidbits turn out to be useful,” Weekes said. “And then we have a whole team of in-house investigators who can do background checks, verify leads, that kind of thing.”
I thought of Dick’s clerical staff. Would any of those receptionists slip information to Harold Weekes in exchange for fifty dollars? If you made thirty or forty thousand a year in a firm where the managing partner pulled in seven figures, you might feel you were entitled to a bonus by letting out nonessential information. You might not reveal a witness list, but if the firm worked with a PI, that could seem like a harmless thing to reveal to Harold Weekes.
Come to think of it, maybe that was how Lawlor knew I’d been at the Parterre Club with Salanter last week; the old woman in the restroom, the bartender, any of them might privately feel that Salanter’s guests were Wade Lawlor’s business.
“I can’t imagine Eloise Napier blurting out team secrets for a measly fifty dollars,” I heard myself say.
“Eloise?” Lawlor smirked, the way kids on the playground do when they know a secret they’re not going to let you in on. “Fifty dollars doesn’t pay for a pair of Eloise’s stockings, from what I hear.”
“Eloise is a good team player,” Weekes rebuked him. “We sit together on several committees and she would never reveal a client or a firm’s secret, to me or to anyone.”
“You feel equally confident in Louis Ormond?” I asked.
“I don’t know Ormond,” Weekes said, “but even if I did, I don’t reveal our tipsters’ names without their permission. It could put them in danger. Speaking of people we know, you’re close to Ryerson over at the Herald-Star, aren’t you?”
“Close?” I said. “I know him, and a few other reporters around town. Beth Blacksin on your news crew, for instance. I used to know a lot more reporters, but what with axing news bureaus until they look like a rainforest after an agribusiness bulldozer’s been through, there aren’t that many reporters left to know these days.”
“So Ryerson didn’t blab secrets out of the huddle?” Weekes played with his pencil as if the question weren’t terribly important.
“The huddle!” I snapped my fingers. “I kept trying to remember what you called it—I thought it was the news muddle, where you imagine how to dirty up the news until the viewer can’t tell truth from fiction. No, like Eloise Napier, Murray Ryerson is a good team player. But, like you, I have a lot of sources around town.”
26.
CAR TALK
WHEN I GOT BACK TO MY OFFICE, I SAT FOR A TIME, TRYING to figure out what I’d learned from seeing Lawlor and Weekes up close. Or what I’d revealed. I hoped my defense of Murray had been believable: until now, I hadn’t taken seriously the notion that his career might hang by a thread. I started to send him a warning e-mail, then wondered if Weekes might be monitoring his mail, and decided it would be more prudent to leave it alone.
Hearing Napier and Ormond’s names had made Lawlor smirk. Had the two lawyers said something, say, at a Helen Kendrick strategy meeting, that had led Lawlor to find out about Wuchnik? Or was Wuchnik one of Lawlor’s own tipsters?
I hadn’t brought up Salanter’s name in the meeting, because it seemed to me that Lawlor was hammering on him chiefly as part of Global’s effort to discredit the Durango campaign; I hadn’t thought I’d get anything useful from mentioning him. In fact, what useful fact had I gotten from either of my meetings with the city’s rich and powerful? Back to work, Warshawski, I admonished myself.