Free Charm City by Laura Lippman Page A

prayer to the patron saint of lost causes:
"Please, St. Jude, don't let the editors fuck up my
story."
    Feeney had told Tess about this ritual. And
now she was facing the prospect that Feeney was the one who had fucked
up. It seemed unlikely—certainly he had been too drunk to
sneak into the building, perform a little computer hackery, and leave
without a trace. But if the trail did lead back to him, Tess was
determined to be there to protect him, even if she hadn't
figured out how.
    On the sixth floor, the
publisher's secretary, one of those strangely proprietary
women always found hovering at the elbows of powerful men, ushered Tess
into an empty conference room adjacent to the publisher's
office. It was a subtly opulent room, a place to wine and
dine—well, coffee and croissant in these leaner, more
abstemious times—the city's powerful. Mahogany
table, Oriental rug, a silver tea set on a mahogany sideboard, the
inevitable watercolors of nineteenth-century Baltimore. What must it be
like for the top editors, the ones who traveled back and forth between
this glossy dining room and the chaotic newsroom below, all the while
trying to reconcile this realm of commerce with all those romantic
ideas about journalism? How did they bridge these two worlds, the
corporate and the cause?
    Amnesia, Tess decided. Editors quickly
forgot whatever they knew about reporting. If a man named Smith drove
his truck into a local diner, killing five people, editors
couldn't understand why you didn't call him up and
ask for all the details. "Just look it up in the phone
book," they would say, as if there were only one Smith, as if
he weren't in jail, out of the reach of any phone. And if by
some miracle you did find Smith and get the full story, the editors
would say, "Well, that's what we pay you
for." Or, "We're tight tomorrow, it might
have to hold."
    And now Tess had to face three of these
amnesiacs at once, plus the publisher. The executive editor, the
managing editor, and the deputy managing editor.
    "Three editors," she
said out loud, staring out the window to the north. "Well,
Hercules slew the Hydra."
    "And it had nine heads."
    A man had slipped into the room behind her,
a man with high color in his face and shiny brown hair falling in his
eyes. In blue jeans and a T-shirt, he might have passed for 25. In his
gray wool trousers, red tie, and blue-and-white striped Oxford cloth
shirt, he looked closer to the 45 he probably was. But a cute 45, Tess
decided, checking out his muscular forearms, the wide grin, the boyish
way he kept pushing his hair out of his eyes.
    "Jack Sterling," he
said, holding out his hand. "Deputy managing
editor."
    "Tess Monaghan." Out of
habit, she grasped his hand hard, the way she had pinched
Rosita's when they'd met. But Jack Sterling just
squeezed back even harder. Flustered, she broke the grip, feeling
something she did not want to put a name to.
    He sat on the edge of the gleaming table,
openly appraising her, rotating the wrist of his right hand as he
massaged it with his left.
    "Baltimore mick," he
pronounced, talking to himself as if she were on the other side of a
one-way glass. "Something else blended in, though. Something
solid, good peasant stock. About twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
Athletic. Doesn't like pantyhose or diet soda. How am I
doing?"
    "Midwesterner," she
replied. "Corn-fed Protestant, a onetime wunderkind who is still wunder , if no
longer kind . Probably
plays racquetball—note how he flexes his wrist and rubs his
forearm as he speaks, something an athlete might do. How am I
doing?"
    Sterling laughed. Good, he had a sense of
humor about himself. "Close enough. Only my game is squash,
when my back isn't out, and my wrist hurts because twenty-two
years in this business have bestowed on me a chronic case of carpal
tunnel."
    He began to massage his wrist again, then
dropped his hand abruptly, suddenly self-conscious about the gesture.
"Midwesterner? Well, I guess Oak Park, Illinois, is about