Grievances Page 7

  Hafer took a deep breath. “Ronnie said he understood that he would certainly be fired if he got up out of his chair and attached his mouth to the left breast of the new assistant librarian. His question to me, as the director of human relations, was whether it would affect his pension.”

  The assistant sports editor cackled madly. Walker howled and I even detected a smile from Elaine Heitman, the editor of the Times’s editorial pages.

  “I am outraged,” fumed Carmela, a red flush starting from her neck and moving up to her face. “Absolutely outraged. There is no room for that kind of behavior at the Charlotte Times and I will not stand for it. This needs to be a newspaper of the highest standards.”

  “I agree. We cannot have our employees subject to that kind of verbal treatment,” Hafer said.

  “Ronnie, did you actually say anything to the young woman?” asked Heitman. A sensible question, I thought.

  Bullock had taken a penknife from his pocket, opened the blade and was examining it closely. “No,” he said, looking up from the knife. “Maybe I just should have asked directly instead of calling HR.”

  Heitman ignored his sarcasm and turned to Hafer. “So there is no allegation that he was verbally abusive or engaged in any kind of sexist behavior directly to her?”

  “I don’t know of any.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” interjected Carmela. “What matters is his state of mind. Women do not need to be subject to this kind of mental leering. It has gone on forever and it must stop.”

  “She’s just jealous I saw her first.” Bullock smirked. “There’s more dykes in her department than there are on the goddam Mississippi!” He began trimming his fingernails with the scissors on his knife.

  The assistant sports editor howled.

  “This is preposterous!” Carmela shrieked.

  “It’s true. You should see her staring at the managing editor’s secretary’s breasts. She sits in a chair beside her desk pretending to have a conversation about personnel issues but she never takes her eyes off ’em.”

  “This is libelous!” Carmela shouted, rising out of her chair. “I am not on trial here. I will not be subject to this!”

  Walker struggled to get the meeting back under control. “I feel like I’m tryin’ to herd chickens. Let’s stick to the grievance.”

  “You can’t punish someone for having bad thoughts or even asking rude questions,” I said. “What Ronnie did was stupid. But who got hurt?”

  Heitman took off her glasses and cleared her throat. “John, employees regularly come to you with questions about company benefits and policies.” She said it as statement for him to confirm, a little like a cross-examining lawyer. “And Ronnie’s question was about his pension, correct? Whether he would lose it if he got fired for what would be considered sexual assault or sexual harassment?”

  “Well, ostensibly,” Hafer said cautiously. “But I don’t think he was looking for a serious answer.”

  Heitman charged ahead. “In the human relations department, are employee matters confidential? You have records about pay, medical claims that sort of thing.”

  “Of course. All confidential.”

  “If I asked you whether our health insurance covered a particular medical procedure, would that be confidential?”

  “Of course.”

  “Or how much my pension will be when I retire. Would that be confidential?”

  Hafer’s face fell. He could see where this was heading. Bullock could see it, too, and he began to smile.

  “Yes. But this is completely different. This wasn’t a serious benefit inquiry. This was a joke!”

  “Likely, it was a joke,” said Heitman. “A bad joke, but still a joke. Either that, or it was a serious inquiry to the human relations department which is protected by confidentiality. Like Matt said, who got hurt? Frankly, I don’t see why we are even here.”

  Hafer’s face turned beet red. “It was crude and offensive.”

  “Does the young woman, the assistant librarian, feel sexually harassed?” Heitman asked.

  “Of course not,” Hafer answered. “She doesn’t even know.”

  “Do you feel sexually harassed, John? Did Bullock’s remark create a hostile work environment for you?” she probed.

  If it was possible, Hafer blushed even deeper. “No, of course not. But Ronnie Bullock was way out of line and this isn’t the first time.”

  “He offended you. It seems to be the normal thing would be for you to tell him that and ask for an apology. Have you done that?”

  “No. I thought it was a matter for the Discipline Committee.”

  “Next time, why don’t you try asking for an apology?” she said sweetly.

  Walker asked Bullock if he had anything to add.

  “I don’t think there’s much dispute about the facts,” he said. “I only have one question. When did we decide we were going to start policing thoughts and not just actions?”

  Bullock and Hafer were dismissed from the meeting and for the next half hour the discussion plowed old ground. I was reminded of a conclusion I’d come to before: for people in the communications business, we’re pretty lousy communicators. One person gets offended and instead of just bringing it up with the individual who committed the alleged offense, a whole committee has to get involved.

  Carmela put up a fight but in the end, Heitman’s view prevailed. The committee recommended to management that Ronnie Bullock apologize for expressing an offensive thought and be reminded to avoid sexist language and behavior in the future. There would be no official discipline and nothing would go in his permanent record.

  Carmela had her own methods of retribution. “I cannot believe we are going to turn aside our eyes to this indignity! I can tell you that in the future we will have a very difficult time finding room for Ronnie Bullock stories on the front page . . . not that I would expect any in the first place.”

  Typical Carmela. But it could have been worse. The whole thing had taken less than two hours. A rough justice had been achieved. As far as Live Toads go, the Ronnie Bullock discipline committee meeting hadn’t been that hard to swallow.

  My luck held when a beat reporter called in sick and I was assigned a school board meeting that ended in a fistfight and a front-page byline for me. I had put the finishing touches on it when I looked up to see Walker Burns approaching my cubicle with an expression like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary.

  “Well, Big Shooter,” he said, sitting down and propping his feet on my desk, “you get your wish. Two weeks on Wallace Sampson. No other assignments. Unless the plane crashes.” “Unless the plane crashes” was Walker’s usual qualifier when doling out a project that would take a reporter out of the mainstream of the flow of news for a while. It meant you had freedom to pursue your project exclusively, except in the case of some overwhelming news event like a plane crash.

  It was the best news I could have heard. Certainly it was the first good news I’d had in a long while. At least for two weeks, I could leave behind the world of discipline committees, hate mail, daily deadlines, and one-day wonders and count myself among the true big shooters. At least for a while, I had been given the opportunity to do real investigative reporting.

  But I was also scared. Brad Hall was taking a chance on me. Walker was taking a chance on me. I was taking a chance on me. My career was dead if this didn’t work out and truth is, my gut was less confident than my mouth. I tried to be cool, like this was an everyday thing, but my throat went dry and I could only croak, “Thanks, man.”

  But Walker wasn’t done. “I want to double-team this one. I’m putting you and another reporter on the story, at least for the two weeks.”

  I was puzzled. It wasn’t unusual to put two reporters on a story but I knew we were short-staffed and, anyway, this was one story I had developed on my own.

  “We’
ll cover twice as much ground with two of you,” Walker explained. “And in terms of investigative reporting, you’re a rookie. I want you to have some help.”

  “Who?”

  “Bullock.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “Bullock? That’s crazy. We’re dealing with black people down there. Bullock’s a redneck. No one will talk to us.”

  “Ronnie Bullock might be able to teach you something. He was a damn fine reporter once.”

  “Once,” I said sullenly. “Why not someone from the projects team?”

  “Because we barely have enough reporters to cover the city council meeting much less some years-old killing in a place far, far away. You tell me this could be a good story and my gut tells me you’re right and I get paid because someone decided that my gut instincts were the ones to listen to. So we’re going to do it. At least, we’re going to take the sniff. That’s all I’m committing to. But whatever we do, we have to fly below the radar. The publisher can’t know we’re putting even one staffer, especially you, on this story, much less two. If I take one of the big boys from the projects team, he’ll notice in a heartbeat.”

  Walker paused. “Plus, I’ve got two other reasons.”

  “What are they?”

  “With the disciplinary crap with Ronnie and all this protest stuff with you, I need to get you both out of the newsroom for a while.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “This place is drivin’ me loco. I’ve had it with the publisher. I need a new ranch to ride. I’m lookin’ for the story that’ll punch my ticket outta here.”

  Lots of us were. But it was still a shock to hear Walker say it. I couldn’t imagine working at the Times without him, but that was a discussion for another time.

  There’s no question I would have preferred to go to Hirtsboro alone. And if I did need to have a partner, Ronnie Bullock wouldn’t have made the top ten on my list. But at the end of the day I’d gotten what I’d wanted.

  And so was created the unlikely team that would investigate the years-old murder of Wallace Sampson: a rich Yankee blueblood with a social conscience, an occasionally embarrassing redneck reporter throwback, and me.

  Chapter Six

  It was the next week before shifts were rearranged and news stopped breaking out sufficiently so that Walker felt comfortable springing Bullock and me to go to Hirtsboro.

  It took less time than that for us to butt heads.

  “We’re taking my Dodge,” Bullock informed me as we planned over coffee in the newspaper cafeteria, a place that perpetually smelled of Lysol and green beans cooked to death. “That rice-burner you drive is an insult to the American working man and it sure as hell will look out of place in Hirtsboro, South Carolina. Besides, the Dodge has an engine. We might need it.”

  Light from the window created a thin rainbow of film that floated on top of Bullock’s coffee, like gasoline on water. He stirred four heaping teaspoons of sugar and several ounces of milk into the Styrofoam cup. The coffee barely lightened. “God, this stuff is nasty,” he marveled. “I wonder how they make it so bad.”

  “Get off it, Ronnie. When’s the last time a reporter was involved in a high-speed chase?”

  “It could happen. You need to remember who’s got the experience here. You’ve never done this before. Tell the truth, I’m a little irritated about having to take you with me.”

  “You’re irritated! I’m irritated! This is my story. I don’t want you blowing it with some racist attitude.”

  He pushed his chair back and shook his head, as if he’s seen it all. “You wet-behind-the-ears jerks with journalism school degrees piss me off. Racist? I’ll tell you what’s racist. The newspaper’s Black History Month. That’s racist. The paper has to have at least one story a day about black history during Black History Month. I ask, ‘When are we gonna have White History Month?’ Oh, they say, we would never do that. People wouldn’t stand for it. Besides, I believe you’re the one they refer to as ‘the racist.’ And here’s another thing,”—he was warming to his rant—“the amazing killer editors haul me in and tell me I need to make my stories, quote, more accessible to busy mothers and other women who are joining the workforce in increasing numbers and have less time to read the newspaper, unquote.

  “You know what I say to that? I say my job is to find out about things people don’t know about. I write them and put them in the newspaper. It’s called news. I don’t worry if it’s for rich people or poor people or blacks or whites or men or women. It’s just news. And if mothers don’t have time to read it, maybe they should quit their jobs and stay home and take care of the families.” He took a gulp of coffee. “God, this is bad. If women are gonna work, at least they ought to make good coffee.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, Ronnie, the caveman approach hasn’t exactly endeared you to women in the newsroom.”

  “If you mean Carmela Cruz, who cares? I can’t figure if she’s the woman or the man in the relationship anyway.”

  “Well, it so happens that Cruz has a lot to do with whether our story gets on the front page. And I care more about writing page-one stories than I do about political correctness. So forget that J-school crap, okay? I’ve been here five years. I do the same thing you do. I earned this. Without me, you wouldn’t be on the story. Without me, there wouldn’t even be a story.”

  Trust. Always it’s about trust. Not just with your sources, but also with your colleagues. Getting Ronnie Bullock to trust me was going to take some work. Trusting him wasn’t going to be any easier.

  I called Brad to let him know we were coming. In the spirit of harmony, I agreed we’d take Bullock’s car.

  The smog from Charlotte’s one hundred thousand commuters reduced the mid-morning sun to a pale disc and diluted the Carolina sky to a weak blue as we headed south on the interstate. Bullock wore his characteristic khaki uniform, cowboy boots, and mirrored aviator sunglasses.

  “We need to make a list of the most important things to get done,” I said. “Two weeks seems like a long time. But when you’re trying to track down people who don’t know you’re coming, it’s not.”

  “We need to see where it happened,” Bullock said. “And did you already check the police records?”

  “Naw. We need to do that. Plus, I want to interview Wallace Sampson’s girlfriend. She was the last one to see him before he was killed.”

  “Get this stuff down,” Bullock commanded. “There’s a pen in the glove box.”

  I opened the glove box and a gun rolled out, bouncing off my kneecap and dropping to the floor.

  “Damn!” I shrieked. “It’s a gun!”

  “It’s a .38 police special. It’ll stop a bad guy.”

  I felt heat from my neck. “That thing could have gone off!”

  “No way. Safety’s on. Put it back, will you?”

  I gently picked up the gun, afraid it was going to fire. It was the first time I had ever held one. I was surprised by its weight. I laid it back in the glove box and snapped the door closed.

  “So, it’s true. You do carry a gun.”

  “For this trip, we’ve got three. The .38 in the glove box. A 30.06 in the trunk. And in case of emergencies, this.” He kept his foot on the gas while hoisting his right pants leg over his boot. Strapped around his calf was a garter-sized holster and in it, a tiny pistol. He pulled it out and cradled it in his right palm for me to see. “A single shot derringer. For when all else fails.”

  A few miles later, the traffic thinned and the interstate stretched flat and straight to the horizon. Without a word Bullock punched the accelerator and we rocketed ahead. We hit one hundred miles an hour before he eased off the gas.

  “What happens if we get pulled over with all these weapons on us?” I asked. “Aren’t there laws about transporting firearms across state lines? What about the ATF?”

  “We’re in South
Carolina, boy. Down here, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ain’t a government agency, it’s a damn shopping list.” He gunned the engine and the Dodge zoomed around a truck hauling chickens and snowing feathers.

  “Look, Ronnie, that cowboy shit is past. I don’t care if it is South Carolina. I’m not spending time in some jail on weapons charges.”

  “Relax, Harper,” he said. “I’ve been doing this a long time. Amazing motor isn’t it? It’s a 383 with quad Holley carbs. If we had to, we could outrun anyone but Richard Petty.”

  I said nothing. There were only two alternatives, neither of them good. Either we were undertaking an assignment that would involve fast cars and gunplay or we had a nut-case situation. And the nut case wasn’t Brad Hall, it was my partner, Ronnie Bullock.

  South of Columbia, Bullock announced that he was hungry. I suggested we wait until Windrow. “The Halls will have something waiting. Civilization is pretty scarce around here.”

  “Nonsense,” said Bullock. “Every place has got fast food.”

  Every place, it turns out, except most places in South Carolina.

  The sun was high by the time we reached Edgewood, a small town about the size of Hirtsboro, but with the railroad tracks on the outskirts, by the cotton gins, not in the center of town. A gas station. An abandoned motel. A feed and seed. An auto supply store. A place selling discounted recliners. No fast food. Ahead on the left loomed the First Baptist Church and its cemetery. In the middle of the road in front of the church stood a policeman, his hand raised for us to stop. When we did, he waved and a funeral procession began to file out of the parking lot.

  “Hot damn!” said Bullock.

  When the last of the cars had left the lot, the cop waved us on and Bullock eased the Dodge behind the procession. We continued down the main road toward the outskirts of town. The procession turned left down a leafy residential street. Bullock followed and when the car ahead of us parked, Bullock pulled to the curb, too.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Look bereaved.”

  I started to protest. But before I knew it we were following an old couple up the wooden steps into a very nice home, apparently of the recently deceased. The scent of flowers and fried chicken suffused the air.