Grievances Page 5

  I caught my breath and added, “And if you were anything other than a blueblood fatcat who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, you might care, too.”

  I detected a faint smile from Brad but his father was stunned. The room fell silent. Mary Pell and Willie Snow were nowhere to be seen but parfait glasses of blueberries and heavy cream had found their way to our places. I got the feeling that no one had ever spoken to Everett Hall this way before, especially not at Windrow where he was the lord and master.

  “Enough,” Mr. Hall commanded, pushing himself away from the table. “This discussion is done.”

  “Well,” Lindsay said brightly, as if it were just another meeting of her book club. “This has certainly been a lively evening. Such good conversation.”

  Good-byes were awkward—compliments to the shooter of the birds and to the chef but no mention of the dinner-table controversy. As Brad drove us back to their house in the Volvo, Lindsay searched for some common ground that would bridge the gap between her husband and her father-in-law.

  “Brad, I know you feel strongly about this. I admire what you and Matt are doing, but aren’t there people who deal with these things? The FBI or the state police or something?”

  “There’s no federal crime for the FBI to be involved in.”

  “It just seems like you shouldn’t do it on your own. You need some investigative expertise.”

  “That’s why Matt is along.”

  “You have so many other important things to keep you busy, like the Windrow plant book.”

  “More important than finding a killer?”

  “Well, it’s just not something we should be associated with. It’s such a local issue. It really should be handled by the local community.”

  I wanted to say, “Do you think it matters to Mrs. Sampson who solves her son’s murder?” But I kept quiet on the grounds that I had staked myself out far enough for one evening. And besides, Brad had a better answer.

  “Honey,” he said, “we are the locals.”

  “Not in the same way they are. Look, Brad, we have a good thing here. A good life. You’re going to mess it up.”

  “What’s messed up is that a thirteen-year-old was murdered and no one cares.”

  Lindsay tried a new tack. “What about your relationship with your father?”

  “What are your worried about, the inheritance?”

  “That’s so crass!” she said. “Your father loves you. You are a Hall. You have a heritage to live up to. Don’t ruin that.”

  We had arrived at the house. Brad turned off the engine but remained in the driver’s seat thinking. “The Halls used to have a heritage. My forebears took risks, crossed the seas over principles. But the genes have gotten weak. I don’t think my father or his brothers would cross the street for a principle. Honey, there’s no heritage to live up to. There is one to restore.”

  I lay in bed listening to Brad and Lindsay sparring in the bedroom and realized Walker Burns was right. Even if we hadn’t traveled all the way back to the antebellum South, we weren’t far off. My dad was the editor of The Detroit Free Press during the Detroit riots of 1967. I’d heard the gunfire downtown from my bed in the suburbs. After the riots, the National Commission on Civil Disorders warned that America was moving toward two societies, one black, one white. Hirtsboro wasn’t moving that way. Hirtsboro had started out that way and almost two hundred years later, jerks like Everett Hall and even Lindsay were making sure nothing changed. They and the rest of their kind needed to be set straight.

  Chapter Four

  Walker Burns was waiting for me when I returned from Windrow. “I got a good one for you today, Big Shooter,” he drawled, true to his Texas roots. Walker called all reporters Big Shooter when he was in a good mood, which is to say when news had broken out. “I guarantee you it’s a ‘Holy Shit, Mabel.’”

  A “Holy Shit, Mabel” story was, by Walker’s definition, a story good enough that it would theoretically cause a woman to lean over her fence and say to her neighbor, “Holy shit, Mabel, did you see that story in the Charlotte Times today?”

  I had intended to bring up the Wallace Sampson story with Walker first thing. I needed time—company time—to go back down and really investigate. I had spent the drive back from Windrow thinking how to get Walker to buy into the idea. Convincing him wasn’t going to be easy. I had a few lingering doubts myself.

  Hirtsboro was a long way away, Wallace Sampson had been killed years ago and the only thing we had to go on was a rich guy’s suspicion and a vague promise of help from a local preacher. I had prepared a pretty good argument that, at worst, we could get a feature on an unsolved killing and a rich Yankee’s unlikely quest. In the very best case, I would argue, the Charlotte Times could solve a murder. And a newspaper which published either one could hardly be portrayed as racist. But for now, the Wallace Sampson story pitch would have to wait.

  When news breaks out, the newsroom is my favorite place in the world. It is a place where the job changes in an instant, where a plane crash or a press conference or a document hidden in city hall determines what you do that day—and you seldom know in advance what that’s going to be. It’s a place where you get information before anyone else and then get paid to tell everyone. But more than anything, it’s a place of fascinating people—writers, a few of them tortured; photographers, many of them off-the-wall; graphic designers, including the artistically temperamental; and copy editors, stern custodians of the purity of the Mother Tongue, some of them zealots.

  As the managing editor, Walker is the ringmaster of our little circus. He has several assistants, but at the end of the day it is Walker who decides what stories will be covered and who will cover them. It is Walker who, as the final editor, ultimately determines how the stories will read when they finally go to press. His desk sits smack in the middle of the newsroom, police scanners on one side, radios to communicate with reporters and photographers in the field on the other, a bank of phone lines in the middle, and, of course, Colonel Sanders. But Walker spends much of his time moving from reporter’s desk to reporter’s desk in the newsroom assigning, cajoling, joking and editing.

  “Let’s hear it,” I said to him.

  “Last night, a commercial jet on a flight from New York to Charlotte comes in so low at the airport that it hits a telephone pole short of the runway. The pilot pulls up in a hurry, makes a safe landing and doesn’t tell anyone. Just moseys along to the hotel and hopes no one notices.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Exactly.”

  “How’d we find out?”

  “Maintenance guy is getting the plane ready this morning and notices there’s a hole in one of the wings. He happens to bunk with a local flight attendant who came in on the plane. She tells him there was a huge bang on board, that there’s no way the pilot couldn’t have known what happened. The maintenance guy doesn’t fully trust the airline or the FAA. So he calls us. I got Jeffries chasing the airline. Keating in the Washington bureau is thrashing through the bureaucracy at the FAA. Bullock’s working the phones trying to find passengers—one hundred twenty-one of them, plus crew. I need you to find the pole. Take a photographer and get a picture of it. How tall is it? What’s it look like? We got an artist working on a re-creation. I want to know exactly how high that plane was and how far away it was from the end of the runway.”

  “Got it.” I hesitated. Bringing up the Sampson case now, even indirectly, had its risks. Approached at the wrong time, when his mind was elsewhere, Walker was likely to shoot down, at least in the short-term, any idea, no matter how good. But I decided to plunge ahead. “Walker, after deadline, I need to talk to you about something.”

  “I know. You want a raise.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not it. It’s about a story.”

  “Fine. Now grab Drake and get going. I need you back by seven o’ clock.”


  Within minutes, photographer Fred Drake and I were headed for the airport. Coming from New York, I figured the plane had landed from the north to the south on Runway 36. We parked at a chain link fence a quarter mile off the end of the runway and started walking in a straight line away from the airport through the low brush, counting steps and avoiding broken beer bottles as we went. We found the telephone pole fifteen minutes later, next to an aircraft radio beacon installation. It was shorter than normal, leaning to the side and shattered at the top. Splinters littered the ground and on some of them I could see gray paint. I had taken five hundred twenty-five steps. I figured my stride averaged thirty inches. That meant we were a quarter of a mile from where we’d parked and that the pole was just a half-mile from the end of the runway.

  Drake scrambled around the site like a monkey, shooting close-ups of the splinters on the ground; then telephoto shots of the top of the pole; then wide-angle shots of the whole scene, which showed the relationship of the pole to its surroundings. He extracted a tape measure that he used for precise focusing of studio shots, shimmied up the pole to the top and dangled the fully extended tape.

  I was imagining a 737 roaring over, its unknowing passengers only a few feet above my ahead with another half mile to go before touchdown, when a voice commanded, “Hold it right there! Hands in the air!”

  My first thought was that we were being robbed. There were some tough neighborhoods not far from the Charlotte airport. But I looked up to see a county policeman walking through the brush toward us.

  “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “We’re from the Times,” I said. “I’m Matt Harper. This is Fred Drake. We’re on a story.”

  “You need to get outta here now or I’m going to arrest both your asses.” The officer grabbed me by the elbow. Drake shimmied down the pole, raised his camera and snapped a picture.

  Infuriated, the cop charged Drake and grabbed for the camera.

  “Hands off the equipment, officer!” Drake yelled, whirling away. The camera flew from his hand, smashed into the concrete slab that supported the airport beacon and popped open, exposing the film in the back.

  The cop smirked. “It looks like I don’t need that camera after all.”

  I thought of telling him how airports belong to the citizens and not to the government. That as long as we weren’t a danger to aviation, no one should be hassling us because no harm can come from the people simply knowing the facts. But I kept quiet. An argument with a cop over the public’s right to know wasn’t an argument I was likely to win. Accompanied by the officer, Drake and I made our way back to the car. We were back in the newsroom, as instructed, by 7:00 p.m.

  Walker Burns sat at a computer keyboard flanked by reporters Ronnie Bullock, Rich Keating and Julie Jeffries, the Times’s newest staffer and the first recruited from a television station. I joined the huddle over Walker’s shoulder. The reporters had typed their notes into the system and Walker was crafting them into a story. The first-edition deadline was looming.

  “Was it one hundred twenty-one passengers including crew or one hundred twenty-one passengers plus crew?” he demanded of Jeffries.

  She flipped her perfect brown hair from her face, consulted her notes and answered crisply, “One hundred twenty-one total. Five crew and one hundred sixteen other passengers.” With her pouty mouth, bedroom eyes, and gym-honed body, Jeffries was TV-gorgeous. Rumors that she’d been hired on orders from the publisher were certainly plausible. But I had to admit she knew what she was doing.

  Walker banged out a few more paragraphs. “What’s the FAA say?”

  Keating read him the agency’s boilerplate response and Walker typed it.

  “The FAA. What horseshit. Bullock, give me your best quote from a passenger.”

  “I got a lady from Rock Hill who says it was as if an occult hand reached down and . . .”

  “Cut the shit,” Walker barked. It was a time-honored Charlotte Times tradition that Walker would give you the day off if you could manage to get the phrase “it was as if an occult hand had . . .” into the newspaper. Walker had to pay off so infrequently that reporters had taken to asking questions this way (as in the case of a tornado): “Would you say it was as if an occult hand had reached down and tore through the trailer park?” Sometimes the puzzled interviewee would say, “Yeah, I guess so,” and the quote would be written up and submitted, only to be caught and edited out by Walker.

  “Bullock, what I’m looking for is something that says there’s no way the pilot could have not known that he hit something. There’s two great angles here: that the plane hit something close to the ground and that the pilot covered it up.”

  “Use this,” said Bullock. “It’s from a Charlotte businessman. He said, “It was a very loud thump and the plane shuddered. The only way anyone wouldn’t have felt it is if they were dead.”

  “Perfect,” Walker said. “Harper, how high was he? How much of the pole is left?”

  “Twenty feet, nine inches.”

  Walker looked up from his computer. “How do you know?”

  “We measured it with a tape measure.”

  “Excellent. How thick was the pole?”

  “The same as a normal telephone pole, I assume.” I regretted saying it as soon as it left my lips. “Actually,” I admitted, “we didn’t check. You didn’t mention you needed to know how thick it was.”

  “Pardner, do I have to tell you every question to ask or can you think for yourself? Now get your ass back out there and find out how thick it was. We’ll leave it for the first edition and fill in the hole in the second.” He removed his glasses, cocked his left eyebrow and stared at me. It was a familiar gesture and I grimaced. “Now, hustle.”

  I grabbed Drake’s tape, jumped in the staff car and beat it back to the airport. When I got to where we had parked, my heart sank. The area between the road and the pole had been cordoned off with yellow police tape. Where there had been one cop, now there were at least a dozen.

  I spotted the officer we had encountered earlier and hoped he wouldn’t hold Drake against me. “Sir, I’m sorry to have to bother you but I need to get back in there just for thirty seconds.”

  “You ain’t goin’ nowhere. Feds are here now.”

  “I just need to measure the pole.”

  He walked away.

  They say nothing focuses the attention like an impending execution and maybe that’s what suddenly inspired me. I approached two crew-cut men sitting in a dark sedan with government plates and a seal on the door that said Federal Aviation Administration.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said to the driver. “I’m Matt Harper from the Charlotte Times. I’m hoping you can help me. I need to get into the site. I’m doing a story about what happened.”

  “Comment has to come from Washington.” He turned away.

  “I don’t need comment,” I persisted. “I just need to get to the pole that got hit.”

  “Why?”

  “To measure how thick it is.”

  “How thick? You mean how tall.”

  “No, I mean thick.” I wasn’t going to tell them I already knew how tall and get into a whole controversy about how I’d been trespassing earlier.

  For the first time the FAA guys looked interested, as if I had some theory about the incident that they hadn’t thought of, a theory that somehow related to the pole’s thickness. “Why?” he asked.

  “To tell you the truth, I really don’t know,” I confessed. “My editor wants it in the story we got going in the morning. He wants to know something, my job is to find it out. You ever have a boss that asks you to do stupid stuff you don’t understand?” I was trust-building. After all, these were government workers and knew about stupid bosses. “You know how for a while you fight it and then you figure out the path of least resistance is best because in the end, you’re gon
na end up doing it anyway?”

  “Every day,” the driver said.

  “Every day,” his colleague agreed.

  “That’s what this is.”

  “Hop in,” the driver said.

  I jumped in the back seat. As we drove through the security perimeter, I gave a thumbs-up to the cop who had threatened to arrest us. When it comes to freedom of information prevailing, I am not exactly a gracious winner.

  When I returned to the newsroom, Walker was still at the terminal. The first edition hadn’t yet gone to press but Walker was already hard at work doing a rewrite for the second edition.

  “It was right at forty inches around,” I reported.

  “What was?” he said without looking up

  “The pole.”

  “The pole. Oh, good,” he said it as if the information were no longer relevant. “How do you know?”

  “I measured it.”

  “Good. So that makes it how thick—about a foot?”

  “Using sixth grade math, which is as far as I got, yes.”

  “About like a normal telephone pole,” Walker concluded.

  “That’s what I first said.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t know. There’s a difference between what you think and what you know. Now you know.”

  Walker returned to the terminal and I returned to my desk. Sometimes one of the most frustrating parts of being a reporter is waiting on all the people who have to work with your copy. After Walker, there’s the editor for the part of the paper where the story is headed—local or front page. Then it’s off to those sticklers on the copy desk who feel compelled to justify their professional existence by asking irrelevant questions and suggesting inelegant changes. If it’s big enough, the top editor will read the story and maybe even the publisher. All the while, the reporter waits with two things in mind—be available in case there’s a need to answer questions; be vigilant in case idiots fresh from journalism school start trying to butcher the copy or write an off-base headline. Two things are guaranteed: if you stick around, no one will have questions and no one will mess too much with your copy. If you don’t, there will be questions and changes galore.