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TWO
CHAPTER TWO
  Carl hung his
coat on the back of his chair and made some room on the cluttered desktop. Somewhere in that mess was the piece
of paper with the list of names that the old vet—Merl—had passed on to him. He’d look for it, soon enough, but
for now he had a deadline to meet, and quick. He propped his notebook on his telephone and rolled a book into the
Olympia typewriter. The book was three sheets of 8 1/2-by-11 inch paper with carbon between each sheet. He looked
at his notebook, and then started typing:
LANDRY/EAST BOSTON HOMICIDE
Boston
police are investigating the apparent murder of Merl Sawson, 60, of Winthrop Street in East Boston. Sawson, a retired
serviceman, was found in his bed, with a gunshot wound to the back of the head.
Police
said neighbors heard noise in the apartment early Wednesday morning, and one neighbor called police when Sawson
did not show up for an expected lunch meeting.
Carl paused.
It was pretty thin, but that’s what happens when you’re just a few minutes before deadline. Again, he started tapping
at the dirty keys of his typewriter.
While
no suspects have been identified, police are investigating whether Sawson was murdered during the course of a burglary.
The apartment was in disarray and police are checking to see what may have been stolen.
A few more seconds
of paper shuffling on his desk, and Carl typed some more.
The
death of Sawson marks the seventy-third homicide this year in Boston, four homicides ahead of 1971’s record year.
He typed, rolled
the papers out from his typewriter and walked over to the metro desk.
"Here you
are, George," he said. "Ninety seconds ahead of schedule."
"Well,
there you go," George said. "You want a candy bar or somethin’?"
"How about
a raise?"
"How about
leaving me alone?"
After some digging
he found the notebook page with Merl’s list of names and he slid that into the top drawer of his desk. He was tired
and it was late, and he knew he couldn’t do much about the names right now. Tomorrow, first thing, he’d take another
look at it. They had to have meant something to Merl Sawson, since he had passed it over to Carl. But then again,
they could have just been names lifted from magazines or books for no good reason. Lots of things happened in this
city and country for no good reason.
On this afternoon
George didn’t yell over at him with questions about the Sawson story, so it looked like it was going in golden.
A few minutes after he had passed in the story, the door to the oversight editor’s office opened up and a slim
man walked out wearing gray dress pants and a matching vest. Cullen Devane, the current oversight editor and a
major in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He stopped at each of the editorial desks, picked up copy for tomorrow’s newspaper
and then, with a chilly smile, he went back to his office.
Carl looked
around. Everybody was studiously ignoring Major Devane’s appearance, and there was a general sigh of relief in
the newsroom when he went back to his office. Usually Devane only came out to talk to the editors about the next
day’s stories, but on very rare occasions, he chatted with a reporter. On extremely rare occasions, he would invite
a reporter back to his office and close the door. That experience was known in the newsroom as the Killer C; shorthand
for killing one’s career, and also for being sent someplace where an eventual death from cancer was fairly likely,
since Devane had the power to have someone detained or re-upped into the service.
Two months ago
a features writer—Laura Dobson, if Carl remembered correctly—had emerged from Major Devane’s office in tears, hands
trembling, and later that day she was gone. Despite earlier warnings, she had continued to submit stories about
the antidraft movement to her editors. A month after her departure, the newsroom had received a postcard from her
from a decontamination work camp outside of Miami. And that had been that.
After Devane’s
door shut the noise level in the newsroom rose and there were looks cast Carl’s way. Even though he had been out
of the Army for four years, some people still thought he and Cullen Devane worked together, though he had shared
maybe a fistful of words with the major during his time at the Globe. Irrational, he knew, but it still made for
a lot of solitary lunches, muttered greetings in the morning, and break-room conversations that dribbled off whenever
he went in to get a cup of coffee.
He looked over
at the clock. Past 5 p.m. His stomach grumbled and he was in the middle of wondering where in hell he was going
to eat dinner when Jack Burns came over to his desk, pulling a leather coat over his thin shoulders. Jack was a
few years younger than Carl; wore loud clothes with wide-bottomed pants, and was a music critic for the Globe.
His wavy brown hair touched the rear of his shirt collar and his sideburns were the style still popular with Elvis
Presley—who was on tour this fall for refugee relief. Carl thought it was incredibly funny that someone could write
for the Globe and get paid for writing about music, but he kept that thought to himself. Jack was a good sort and
one of the few people in the newsroom who treated him nicely.
"Some of
us are going over to the Old Sod for a newsroom meeting," Jack said, buttoning his coat. "Want to join
us?"
"Newsroom
meeting? Isn’t that just another excuse for getting drunk?"
Jack smiled.
"Who needs an excuse? Besides, it gives you a chance to see your colleagues drooling and slobbering over each
other. Makes for a good week of wicked gossip. So that’s the kind of meeting we’re having. Are you in?"
Going home,
which was an apartment, and meant dinner from a can or an old field ration from his Army reserve days. The alternative
was an overpriced beer, cheeseburgers, and smoky conversation at the Old Sod.
"In,"
Carl said. "I’m very in."
Jack smiled
again. "Of course you are, but I’m not telling."
A cheeseburger
and fries later, Carl was working on his second beer of the evening and doing fine. He had a corner stool at the
bar and could keep an eye on most everything in the pub, which gave him a bit of a warm feeling. Something from
his Army days, he realized, about assessing the territory and keeping your options open. The fries had been tasty
and the burger was a good sign of how well recovery was going. Even just a few years ago, hamburgers were stretched
with all kinds of filler—and the wise consumer never asked too many questions—but tonight’s had tasted like 100
percent beef.
Someone with
a taste for old Irish music kept pumping quarters into the jukebox, and he had shared his mealtime with Jack Burns.
Jack talked about rumors of an upcoming Led Zeppelin tour to the United States and Carl talked about that afternoon’s
murder. After a while Jack shook his head at him. "My dear Carl, I want to talk about the wonders of rock
and roll, and all you want to talk about is some poor old man, murdered in his bed."
"Because
it’s news," he said.
"Bah,"
Jack said, raising up a glass. "My stories, that’s the news people care about. Whether they’ll have some entertainment
in their gray lives over the next few months, get their minds off this awful election. Not another story about
a corpse. Hell, that dead British general, the Sheffield guy who was found dead in bed with a hooker a couple of
weeks ago, even that only made a few paragraphs in the metro. Who cares about another dead old man?"
"I do,"
Carl said, remembering the earnest look on the lined and nervous face, and those old boots, carefully kept together
with duct tape. "And so should you."
Jack laughed.
"You should bottle some of that excess idealism you have, sell it on the street corners. I hear it’s still
quite rare."
Carl kicked
him and Jack laughed again and wandered off.
The Old Sod
was near the Globe and filled mostly with people from the paper. Jack was now with some of his friends from the
Living page. Even here, in a bar, the people from the newspaper automatically segregated themselves into groups.
Some of the ad reps were over in a corner, overdressed and laughing hard, and some of the print shop boys, with
their ink-stained hands and their blue work clothes, were at the other end of the bar.
Nearby a couple
of sports reporters were talking about the World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Detroit Tigers, and
Carl tuned them out. Unless the Red Sox were in it, he wasn’t interested, and the Sox hadn’t been in anything since
the ’48 series, a lifetime ago.
At the far end
of the bar, a few reporters were laughing, talking about State House and city council shenanigans. There was Kathy
Proulx, a State House reporter, and Jeremiah King, who knew the city council in and out, and Bobby Munson, a general
assignment reporter like Carl who worked the court system. Every ten minutes or so, Jeremiah would shout, "Beer
trivia!" and bet a drink he could outsmart anyone at the bar, and for the most part he did, with Kathy and
Bobby groaning and forking over money.
For a while
Carl just quietly observed, letting the second beer wash away the taste of the burger and fries. Except for Jack,
he never really connected with anyone else in the newsroom, but he understood why. He’d gotten his job through
his veteran’s benefits. Day one on the job, someone had put a toy soldier on his desk, with a little handmade sign
that said "student killer." He’d kept his mouth shut and tossed the toy soldier away—he knew some in
the newsroom were hoping for an outburst, to reaffirm the stories of the crazy 1960s vet—but he hadn’t given them
that satisfaction. He had done his job and had remained quiet, just like tonight.
Office politics—who
was in, who was out, who was backstabbing whom—bored him. He liked talking about things that mattered. Like the
residency laws in the cities and how long they would last. Or stories about the outlying towns in western Massachusetts.
Were there really pockets of hunger out there, ten years after the war? And the rumors about the British. Now that
would be a story to report. Last week he had listened to two pressmen talking in line in the cafeteria, guys who
were in the Air Force Reserve. They had come back from a tour of duty up North, near Minnesota, and the radar stations
there had seen a lot of transport traffic flying into Canadian bases. "I tell ya, it’s like a regular train
schedule up North, all these Brit planes coming in. Makes you wonder what they’re up to." And the other pressman
had said, "Maybe it’s just kippers and beans, more relief food," and the other had snorted. "Not
hardly. Them transports were carrying Brit troops, that’s what, and the officers I talked to, they don’t think
all those Brits are up there for a training exercise." But these stories would never get reported.
He had about
a swallow left of his beer and then Jeremiah raised a hand and again challenged, "Beer trivia!" Kathy
raised her hands mockingly to her face and said, "Enough, already," and Bobby said, "Jesus, I thought
you’d be done by now."
Jeremiah waved
his hand. His brown hair was combed back and even when he smiled, his sharp face looked unpleasant, like he was
a guy who enjoyed being a reporter because it gave him an excuse to be a nosy bastard and get paid for it.
"C’mon,
one more, and a special one," he announced. "Winner of this one gets a free drink from me each night
for a week. All right? Ready?"
Some moans and
groans, and Jeremiah plowed ahead. "All right, here we go. Last beer trivia question of the night. All you
have to do is name the last American in space. Pretty simple, eh?"
Bobby just shook
his head and made a motion of going through his wallet to pay for another beer, while Kathy rolled her eyes. Jeremiah
was laughing, looking so confident and cocky and full of himself, and Carl couldn’t stand it.
"Schirra,"
he said.
Bobby and Kathy
looked over at him, and Jeremiah said, "What did you say?"
"Schirra,"
he repeated, feeling a grin spread over his face. "Wally Schirra, flew a Mercury capsule he called Sigma Seven.
Back in October ’62. Just before the war."
A few shouts
and laughs from people who had been watching, and Kathy eyed him and Bobby sort of nodded in a "good for you
look." But then Jeremiah shut it down.
"Forget
it, Landry," he said. "This was private, among us. Your answer doesn’t count."
Their part of
the bar got quiet. He guessed he shouldn’t have had the second beer. He leaned a bit toward Jeremiah. "Sure
it counts. It’s correct, and you don’t like losing. Right?"
Kathy and Bobby
were staring into their drinks. Jeremiah picked up his beer, face red, and started to turn to Bobby, muttering
something that only a few people, Carl included, could hear.
"Goddam
quota baby."
Carl started
to get up from the bar, to head over and talk to Jeremiah face-to-face, when one of the copy boys came in with
a fistful of the next day’s Globes. "Still warm, still warm, still warm," he chanted. Carl grabbed a
copy of tomorrow’s paper and decided to go home. Why not? He threw a dollar bill on the bar and pushed through
the crowd of newspaper people. No one asked him to stay, no one asked him how he was doing. He stood outside in
the cold night, letting the air clear his head, knowing he’d soon be sober but that the bad taste in his mouth
would be there for a long while.
After four years,
he was still an outsider.
Home was a second-floor
apartment in a brownstone on Commonwealth Avenue, which everyone in Boston called Comm Ave. The neighborhood had
become pricey over the years, and fancy shops had opened up on nearby Newbury Street. A lot of people coming into
wealth—mostly bankers and shippers working for the increasingly busy port—but his veteran’s benefits kept the place
rent controlled and he was comfortable. As he walked around from the rear alley he looked for Two-Tone, the neighborhood
homeless guy, who kept an eye on the cars at night, but Carl didn’t see him. It wasn’t that unusual though, since
Two-Tone always kept his own hours.
On the floor
of the apartment was the day’s mail, which consisted of a bill from New England Bell and an envelope with an American
Red Cross return address. The envelope was thin, which meant it wasn’t good news. He opened it and quickly scanned
the form letter. Handwritten notes filled the blank spots:
Dear Carl Landry
We regret to inform you there is no news regarding the whereabouts of
your sister, Sarah Landry, Newburyport, Massachusetts
whose last known address in 1962 was
the University of Nebraska, Omaha, Nebraska .
We will next contact you in
six months
Please use the reverse of this form to report any additional information that will
assist us in locating the above-referenced individual. A self-addressed envelope is enclosed for your convenience.
Sincerely,
J. J. McCain
Bureau of Missing Persons
American Red Cross
Sorry, sis,
he thought, putting the envelope and letter down on the counter. He thought about throwing the letter away but
did not. In the morning, he’d put it in the thick file that had similar letters and postcards from the Red Cross
and the Salvation Army and Searchers, Inc. and Catholic Charities. He knew that she was probably dead, killed in
one of a half dozen ways in the awful chaos after the war, but still...there was always that one chance. Just the
other day, the Herald had run a heartwarming story of some young man being reunited with his family after spending
ten years walking home from a Peace Corps posting in Bolivia.
He closed his
eyes, just for a moment, seeing her pug nose and bright blue eyes and the dark brown hair that she kept long and
unpermed, much to their mother’s dismay. She had listened to strange records, stuff she called folk music, and
she had even stranger opinions. When he had announced that he was joining the Army, she could not believe him.
"Big bro,
why not wait for the draft? Why join up?" When he had said that he was just doing his duty, that he looked
forward to serving under a president like JFK, she shook her head and said, "Duty to a military-industrial
complex, that’s all." Later, when he was stationed overseas and she won a scholarship to the University of
Nebraska in Omaha, she had sent him just a few letters. The last one had come in the summer of ’62, after she had
been at some sort of student conference in Michigan. The group was called Students for a Democratic Society, and
they were going to change the world. Sarah had enclosed a manifesto about the group’s plans, and Carl had read
the papers and tossed them. It was a mishmash of pie-in-the-sky dreaming, but one phrase had stuck in his mind:
"We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstances by power rooted in love, reflectiveness,
reason and creativity."
Well, a few
months after Sarah’s letter, the whole world saw that real power came from the splitting of atoms. Carl never heard
from his sister again. That had caused many a late night, staring up at the ceiling, wondering how he—in the military—had
survived the war and how his parents and his sister—a college student!—hadn’t.
He made himself
a cup of instant coffee and tried to put Sarah and the damn letter out of his mind, the whole damn day out of his
mind. His left leg was aching, which it usually did after a long day. It was well past midnight and nothing would
be on television. He sat down in one of the two couches and put his feet up on the cluttered coffee table. From
where he sat he could make out the open door that led to his office, which was almost a twin to his desk at the
Globe in terms of its collection of papers and files. It was where he half worked on the book that all newspaper
reporters say they’re writing. The other open door led to his bedroom and nearby bathroom. Large windows in the
living room overlooked the sidewalk and streets and narrow park in this part of Comm Ave.
The walls were
bare, except for a framed print of some skiers on a mountain in France that was left over from the previous tenant.
In a cardboard box in a back closet were a small collection of framed photos, pictures of himself and his family,
taken back when he lived in Newburyport. He had packed them with his Army gear. One of these days, he’d put those
pictures up. But not tonight. And not tomorrow.
He thought about
his gear. Uniforms and fatigues and an idealism he once had, back when the President issued a challenge for his
generation and he had answered with enthusiasm. Now, all that was packed up as well, with the memories of a dead
family.
At his elbow
was his shortwave radio, and he switched it on, hoping to catch a BBC news broadcast, but all he got was static.
Jamming again, and although the British complained often to Philadelphia, there was no proof that it was official
jamming. Maybe it was the Zed Force. They were blamed for a lot of things. He moved the dial around until he got
another frequency,then sat back, letting the coffee warm him up and trying to forget what had happened back at the Old
Sod. As he listened to the proper-sounding announcer describe the latest crisis in Uganda, that nut Idi Amin exiling
thousands of Asian residents, he felt sleepy and knew that if he didn’t move quickly, he’d end up spending the
night on the couch.
He sat up and
switched off the radio, finished the coffee and looked down at the next day’s Globe. Well, actually, it was now
today’s Globe, and he started flipping the pages, yawning and scanning the stories and the headlines. McGovern
makes a speech. Rockefeller makes a speech. Polls still show a Republican trouncing in a few weeks. Robbery in
Dorchester. Secretary of Relief and Recovery makes a speech. Franco-German spy ring allegedly broken up in Seattle.
Progress made in releasing interned B-52 crews from Mongolia.
After a few
minutes, he wasn’t yawning anymore.
His story on
the East Boston murder wasn’t there.
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