Free The Nightgown by Brad Parks Page A

eavesdropping more assiduously, I heard the brunette say, “…can’t send Petersen. The last time he left the office we were still using hot type. Besides, he’s doing rewrite tonight.”
    “What about Hays?” Szanto asked.
    “He left twenty minutes ago, which probably means he’s drunk already.”
    “Whitlow?”
    “Vacation,” the brunette informed him.
    “And there’s seriously no one in the Union County bureau who can hop on this thing? Come on, we’ve got to have someone ,” said Szanto, signaling his concern by throwing down a handful of Tums and crunching noisily on them.
    As I rose from my chair and walked toward them, I heard the woman protest, “I know, but what am I supposed to do, pull a reporter out of my…”
    “I’ll go,” I interrupted.
    The woman studied me like I had just fallen out of the Dummy Tree.
    “I’m sorry, who the hell are you?” she asked.
    “This is Carter Ross,” Szanto said. “He’s a reporter with the Pitts County Patriot. He’s interviewing for Millstein’s old job.”
    “Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my right hand toward the woman and flashing the smile I usually reserved for bar pickups. “What’s your name?”
    “Tina Thompson. But unlike you, I actually work here.”
    “And I don’t. Yet. But there’s no reason to hold it against me.”
    “If you’re here for a job interview, shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, interviewing with someone?” Tina asked.
    “I’m just over there doing some fake writing. Why don’t I do some real writing instead?”
    Szanto, who had turned his mouthful of antacid into fine chalk, kept swiveling his attention between the two of us, then turned back his office.
    “What the hell,” he said as he passed through the door. “Give the kid a chance.”

    Tina was fixing me with a look that registered a 9.75 on the Incredulity Scale, which normally only goes to 8.
    “One of these days, I want to know what it’s like to work for a real newspaper,” she grumbled.
    I once again gave her my best barstool smile.
    “Oh fine,” she said. “That little rag in Pennsylvania give you a laptop and a cell phone?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You got them with you?”
    “Always,” I said, giving her my number.
    “Good. Get in your car and start driving toward Carteret. I’ll call you on the way.”
    Having grown up just a few towns away from Newark, in a McMansion-intensive suburb called Millburn, I knew the way to Carteret, even if it wasn’t the kind of place where my prep school took regular field trips. Carteret was part of New Jersey’s rust belt, that corridor north of Exit 12 on the Turnpike that the state tourism commission forever wished could be moved somewhere less visible. Like Pakistan.
    I had barely settled into my car, an aging Chevy Nova with brakes that could almost stop a 10-speed bicycle, when my phone rang.
    “Carter Ross,” I said.
    “You already sound too smug,” Tina informed me. “This is a job interview, remember? You should sound deferential and nervous.”
    “You mean like: C-C—C-Carter R-R-Ross?”
    “Better. Okay, here’s the deal, someone crashed his car into a building at the corner of Roosevelt and Jefferson in Carteret. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a big deal, except we’re hearing the someone was Lenny Ryan. You know who Lenny Ryan is?”
    “Not really.”
    “He’s a State Senator, but he’s more than that. Lenny Ryan has the entire Democratic portion of Union County trapped under his thumb. All the patronage hires, all the municipal contracts, all the political appointments, they all go through Lenny one way or another. And Lenny always gets his piece.”
    “Sounds like a real charmer,” I said.
    “He is, actually. He’s a classic Irish politician. He’s smart, charismatic, great in front of a crowd and smooth as a baby’s ass. A few years ago, we put one of our best investigative reporters on him for three months. We were going for Lenny’s scalp, but we didn’t even