Free Morgue Mama by C.R. Corwin Page A

7
    Aubrey’s story on the dead prostitute was terrific. It turned out she’d been an outstanding basketball player in high school. The sports department had even run a feature on her. “For all her physical gifts it’s her heart that puts her head and shoulders above the rest,” her coach said at the time. Aubrey re-ran that old quote from the coach and added this new one: “If she hadn’t gotten pregnant and dropped out, she could have gotten a full-ride from any number of colleges. Now she’s just another dead girl from the inner city.”
    The rest of the week Aubrey concentrated on her investigation of the 3rd District. She got several officers, some retired and some still on the job, to talk off the record about Commander Lionel Percy. She compiled all kinds of crime figures, contrasting the 3rd to other districts in the city. Eric and I pulled together all the old stories on past corruption we could find. By Thursday she’d interviewed Chief Polceznec and Mayor Flynn—neither of whom had much of anything to say—as well as several members of City Council and a number of self-appointed community leaders—all of whom had plenty to say.
    By Friday afternoon, Aubrey’s story was pretty much finished except for an interview with Lionel Percy himself. He called her back at six-thirty and told her she had exactly one minute to ask her “worthless questions.” So she started rattling off various facts and accusations. He answered, “Same old tired shit” to every one of them. Before hanging up he said this: “If those dumbfucks on City Council think they can do a better job cleaning up the 3rd, let them gather up their shit shovels and come on down.”
    Aubrey put the quotes in her story and sent it to the desk, knowing they’d never get past Dale Marabout.
    Which they didn’t. Quotes like that wouldn’t get by any copy editor on any newspaper. So Dale told her to kill the quotes and
paraphrase
, the tried-and-true trick for circumventing profanity. When Aubrey refused to paraphrase, Dale rewrote the story himself, which sent Aubrey straight to Tinker.
    People in the newsroom still debate whether Aubrey intentionally set up a confrontation between Tinker and Dale. I can go either way. One thing was sure, Aubrey knew Tinker’s mind better than the rest of us. Tinker told Dale to put the quotes back in and dash the bad words,
s—t, dumbf–s.
    Dale shouted, “You’ve got to be kidding!”
    Tinker shouted back that he wasn’t: “Lionel Percy had the opportunity to answer our questions any way he chose. Readers have a right to know how he chose.”
    Dale filibustered about the
Herald-Union
being a family paper, about our never using language like that before, not even with the appropriate dashes.
    Tinker threw back his head and shared his disbelief with the fluorescent lights. “This is the twenty-first century, Marabout. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about those words anymore.”
    “Then why not print them without the dashes?” Dale wondered. Even the sports guys were gathering around the metro desk now.
    Tinker continued to commiserate with the lights. You just knew he was wondering why on earth he’d accepted the transfer from our paper in Baton Rouge. In his three years as managing editor down there, he’d not only stopped the paper’s horrible slide in circulation, he’d helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize. He’d done all the usual things papers do when panic sets in—he redesigned the paper to look like
USA Today
, created trendy new sections to appeal to people’s active lifestyles, and put pictures of the paper’s columnists on the sides of buses. But the biggest thing he did was spice up the reporting. The
Business Week
feature on him recounted a pep talk he gave reporters one afternoon: He stood on his desk and told them to start writing like the novelists they all really wanted to be. “Treat the truth just like it’s fiction,” he was quoted as saying.
    Tinker wasn’t up on his