One Night in September

[EthanStarr]

September 2nd, 1976

I hate New Jersey.

The New England air in early fall always felt stagnant to Ethan Starr, a young freelance journalist covering the five boroughs who sat alone at a gray picnic bench dotting the green knoll by the Thomas Edison rest stop along the southbound New Jersey turnpike.

When it didn’t feel frozen solid, letting the fumes from overflowing gutters and open service manholes blossom hideously into the air, it was chilly and destructive, cold Atlantic breezes sweeping through to rip the turning leaves from their long, tender sapling branches. This was the time of year that New Yorkers ought to be headed north for Boston, where autumn painted a blazing canvas of oranges and yellows that stretched on for miles across the rocky, forested soil. Instead, Ethan had paid an exorbitant sum for the green and white toll ticket laying on the flat, cold table next to his take-out dinner, and headed down the concrete river into the Garden State, where all the intellectual, social, and economic refuse of New York drifted downstream to snag in civic clumps like Trenton, New Brunswick, Jersey City, Newark, and his own destination, Deepwater. Already, Ethan could see the signs piling up; McDonald’s burger wrappers, soda cans, beer bottles, and a condom package under the picnic bench less than a foot away from his leather loafer littered what might otherwise be a scenic stop along the great 700 expressway. Down here, there was no skyline, no cultivated beauty like Central Park; the land was flat, the sky was cloudy and depressing, and the wind, unhindered in the absence of skyscrapers and thermal blocks of concrete and glass, gave him the shudders despite the sleeveless, diamond-patterned green and off-white sweater over his long-sleeve white button-up. It had only been two hours, and he already missed the boroughs.

In Manhattan, the nippy stillness was stirred by the dynamics of car exhaust, trembling subway cars and the wail of New York’s finest cutting through heavy traffic like a mob of yokels eager to rubberneck the latest crime. Ethan was reminded of the crazy son of a bitch who strolled non-chalantly up a street in the Bronx just over a month ago, pulled a pistol from a brown paper bag and put a bullet in two teenage girls, killing one and wounding the other. She said he was a heavyset white male with curly dark hair, and in their cynicism, Ethan and his freelance journalist associates knew that with that kind of description and a shooting location smack-dab in the middle of the Bronx, one of those girls or her boy toy had run afoul of La Cosa Nostra. Still, the thought of that senseless crime made the pastrami in Ethan’s greasy double decker hoagie taste too salty. The reality that Richard Reuters, a fellow alumnus of Columbia University and a rival in the New York fast scoop scene, had not given into the fear of investigating a mob hit and beaten him to the story is what made Ethan wrap his sandwich back up in the crinkly white wax paper Spimoza’s Deli was so fond of using, his appetite vanished.

It had been one hour, one measly little hour that separated Richard and Ethan’s success for the month of August. Richard submitted his (probably hack) cover story on the Bronx shooting to the New York Times at 7:00am. Ethan rolled in at 8:00am after picking up a bagel with cream cheese from Frankie’s Fabulous Bakeria at the end of Park Avenue, his taxi getting caught in the late morning rush because of the five minute delay, only to have his story rejected without review. He wouldn’t have been late if he had taken the subway, but as far as Ethan was concerned, a person who grew up on Park Avenue shouldn’t have to ride the fucking subway.

Losing a good murder story, especially one with as many unanswered questions as this one, left Ethan to hunt down something worthwhile, a feature that he hoped would give him a one-up on Reuters, who was good at the classic see-and-tell style of reporting but couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag if he actually had to stick his neck out to find the facts when they weren’t laying in a pool of blood in the driver’s seat. City Hall was surprisingly free of scandal, but Ethan knew that good news never happened in August. For something politically juicy, he’d have to wait until late October or early November. The Governor’s Officer was mired in census information, which had absolutely no public appeal, and the other staffers at the Times that Ethan and Richard liked to have coffee with around the corner from the press office were still on vacation, on sabbatical, or too busy making friends down in DC for the election year bonanza. Ethan’s street snitches had nothing they wanted to say, probably spooked by La Cosa Nostra coming down hard on girls barely out of high school; his father, the State District Attorney, was still in the prelims of any major case worth its weight in words; even happy, busy Soho was a frigid tundra, its human interest angles paralyzed in the off-season between holidays.

But last night marked the end of a month-long dry period, when, while sitting at his typewriters in his Central Park West high-rise apartment and trying to dredge up some awful, satirical non-fiction for the Village Voice to give him the spending money he might need to wine and dine a couple of entrepreneurs, both named Steve, who had formed a new computer technology company named after a fruit, he received a far more interesting offer via telephone. The caller introduced himself as Ned Bellings, a murder mystery writer living in Deepwater, south Jersey, and Ethan was two second away from giving the scratchy-voiced and relative unknown the congenial FO by claiming to have a booked schedule through to November 2nd when Ned Bellings casually mentioned he also went by the names Johnathan Steele, Theo Ulst, and Roger Vane.

“Oh,” Ethan nodded into the telephone, before slamming his hand down on the typewriter’s face and standing up from the chair in shocked realization. “Oh! You! Yes, yes, I’m familiar with your work.”

And Ethan was familiar with Ned’s work, even though he’d never personally picked up one of the mystery author’s best sellers; The Rose and Dagger, Red Haze, Bastard Summer and A Night to Remember, along with many other major titles, had been real A-listers written by the same author, though who insisted upon using various nom de plumes for his famous works. The real identity, the real life story, even a picture of the man had been a buried treasure no literature hound could dig up, as his publishing agent with Limelight Books always maintained an unnerving and vexing silence about the author’s true identity.

“I’m glad to hear that, Ethan,” Ned said. “I was calling in the hopes that you’d have time for an exclusive interview. I’m not getting any younger, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in between releases. Its time to come out of the closet. Don’t want my work to fade into obscurity if I walk out tomorrow and have a massive coronary, you know what I mean?”

“Of course I do, Ned. There are a lot of people interested in knowing you, and I’m looking forward to being the first one to meet you. How early do you want to do this?” Ethan asked, just barely keeping the excitement from his voice.

“Tomorrow night. Why put the truth off any longer?”

“My thoughts exactly,” Ethan answered, before the two of them hashed out the minor details that brought the journalist here, to a lonely rest stop off the New Jersey Turnpike. He had his small black voice recorder, his pad and paper with a prepared questionnaire about life experiences, opinions on the publishing industry, the source for his fiction work and other relevant questions that would lead to a full and satisfying biography on one of America’s most mysterious novelists.

Moments after wrapping up his brief dinner, Ethan Starr sat behind the wheel of his maroon 1976 Pontiac Gran Prix. Out of habit, he reached up to open the sunroof, but stopped himself when he remembered there wasn’t any sun out to enjoy. The evening was moving along quickly. By the time on his Swiss wristwatch, a gift from his father for his twenty-first birthday just five years ago, it was already after 6:00pm. Two young men exiting the Men’s Restroom back at the brown brick hub caught Ethan’s attention as he was putting the car in reverse and backing out of his spot. Their cheeks were flushed and red, and he wondered if it was the cold wind blowing across the flat interstate that chapped their cheeks or if it was the aftermath of a blow job that had them both looking warm and sanguine; the Thomas Edison stop, like a few others along the Turnpike, had reputations for illicit sexual behavior that Ethan was very familiar with. Both were young, one clean-shaven, the other older with a mustache, the stereotypical look of the contemporary gay couple discreetly joked about in Playboy’s cartoons and Hustler’s occasional anti-homosexual diatribes in the op-ed section. Regardless, it was possible they were, and it was equally possible that the pairing was a coincidence. Anything was possible.

Especially me earning the reputation of a lifetime after this interview, Ethan thought, and checking the cleanliness of his Crest-white teeth and Aryan blonde comb-over in the rear view mirror, drove southbound to dive headfirst into the Deepwater Interview.

Check

[EthanStarr]

Ethan didn’t like New Jersey; he liked Deepwater even less. Finding his way there from the turnpike wasn’t a problem for someone raised in the Big Apple, where getting from Main to 87th meant navigating a veritable labyrinth of fickle streetlights, behemoth buildings, gawking or dispassionate pedestrians and jerk-off cabbies that would sooner run your metal box off the road than lose a night’s fare by obeying the traffic laws. Cutting in front of a Winnebago with a Maryland license plate, Ethan’s cherry-colored Gran Prix rolled down the off-ramp, oblivious to the blaring horn fading down the turnpike, and shortly thereafter carried him excitedly along a stretch of road that had not been paved since ’63. Gray sky and shadowy oak trees whisked by on the left, but he was busy lamenting the failure of industry and the destruction of nature to his right, where the land gave way to the inlet, its wave-chopped surface the color of scarred sheet metal.

Short smokestacks stalked the edge of the waterfront across the inlet; choking tongues of yellow smoke French kissed the sky, wriggling in its wide, toothless maw like bloated banana slugs oozing into the clouds. The bleak sign reading DuPont identified, but did not positively advertise, the hunched hermit crab of a chemical processing factory. The bold letters were an unappealing black, the borders of the DuPont’s corporate banner sullied to charcoal heather by its own airborne waste. Wrinkling his straight nose, gently tilted at the base of the bridge, Ethan pushed the blocky plastic lever on his dashboard all the way to the right to circulate the air inside the car rather than bring it in through the vents where it could intoxicate his clean and pine fresh interior. It reeked of ammonia and sulfur, a combination of odors he recognized from the manufacturing facility DuPont built out in Amagansett, along the Sound side at Dennistown Bell Park and Alberts Landing. ’74 had been a big year, but at only 23, Ethan learned the hard way that he wasn’t a big man yet – at least, not big enough to topple one of the country’s most heartless polluters. Woodward and Bernstein had put all of their young contemporaries like Ethan on a high, and in the tenacity of his youth, he opted to try to expose the rotten underbelly of industrial depraved indifference with the same vigor as those two Washington Post boys had blown the lid off government corruption.

He had approached DuPont’s business office on Long Island innocently enough, acquiring some company documents regarding safety, manufacturing and transportation and damage control under the guide of a BBB underling headhunting successful operating procedures to reward local companies with a substantial kickback for giving the Bureau a good image. It was in the midst of analyzing this data that Ethan took up the dirtiest work – sitting outside the factory around 5pm, constantly breathing the pungent chemical reek of processed cleaning agents, watching where the crew went for drinks after a day’s work: O’Malley’s, The Grease Pit, Bullshot’s, and the bustling all-hours bar Spades on Friday nights. That was where he drew the lamb from the flock, buying the forty-something sap named Maurice a few cheap beers, letting him win at billiards and giving him a run for his money at darts, talking sweet about sports, politics, and the asinine details of his life until Ethan managed to work him down to bare beef and bone.

“Look, they been good to me for fifteen years,” the employee told Ethan over his Kingston brew, too distracted by his self-pity to wipe the foam from his upper lip. It bubbled and teased, but Ethan, a good listener, ignored it. “But how many times you gonna let a promotion pass over a guy with tenure? We’re talking another two-fifty an hour here. That’s three hundred every other work week!” he exclaimed, as though Ethan couldn’t do the math himself. “I think of the toys I could buy for the kids, the college tuition, the nice things the lady always nags me about – flowers, chocolate, a new wedding right, shit like that – and maybe we could actually afford to go somewhere when I got two weeks of vacation time. I think about everything I’m missing out on, and I just wanna cry. Or punch some mother right in the teeth.”

Ethan, lending an attentive ear and a convincing tongue, leaned over the table littered with peanut shells and cigarette ash. “It’s all about self-interest, pal. It isn’t in the company’s best interest budget to reward a guy whose been there fifteen years and who will be there fifteen more, pulling the same paycheck week after week without asking for a damn dime extra. An honest day’s pay is noble, Maurice, really, but clearly it isn’t making ends meet. There are other ways to make honest money. Like revealing the truth. You can’t get more honest than coming clean in a dirty world.”

Maurice must have liked the glimmer in Ethan’s eye, for he agreed to the investigator’s plan; over the next several weeks, Maurice, now Ethan’s inside informant, delivered data on gauge readings, emissions levels, and even more dangerous records like internal memos addressing related topics. Ethan compared Maurice’s facts to DuPont’s papers obtained from their business office, and upon discovering a damning discrepancy in what was reporting and what was actually done, handed Maurice a Polaroid camera to discreetly acquire physical evidence of DuPont’s carelessness. Since that day, Ethan never enlisted anyone but a paid professional to handle camerawork. Bumbling Maurice got caught snapping shots of the interior of a drainage pipe when it was being pulled from its underground bed leading into Long Island Sound to be replaced. The pictures themselves were fantastic, displaying an amount of residue that far exceeded both the company’s and the EPA’s environmental standards! But on the same day the pictures were delivered to Ethan, DuPont acted quickly. They fired Maurice on the spot and leveled a private but threatening injunction against Ethan to return all illegally obtained information and to desist in further disruption of normal business operations. They feared blackmail, and so treaded lightly, but Ethan didn’t have enough legroom to stand. Cowed, he handed over the pictures, the papers, and readings stolen by Maurice, and was left two hundred dollars out for all the beers and pool games and gas money and, worse, with a wounded pride that still came back every time he saw the bottle of Lysol beneath his kitchen sink.

Ethan’s frown remained firm, even he had long passed the DuPont facility and entered the metropolitan intersection of Deepwater, with a peppermint green Tom Thumb on the corner and a sip-and-duck liquor store across the street from that, its windows covered by iron bars in the places that they weren’t shot through with the cobweb cracks of old bullet holes. It reminded him that Maurice got out of his part of East Hampton when he did, his termination prompting him to take his family to south Queens, into the neighborhood he grew up in; the one he’d been living in at Amagansett eventually succumbed to economic depression after a failed railway venture caused them to tear the place up before they ran out of money to lay down the tracks. Deepwater already looked similar in a lot of ways to Ethan, but he would only have to be here a few hours. Fortunately for Maurice, he never had to see ennui claim the home his children were born in and turn it into a crack house. No, after being fired from his job at DuPont, Maurice was so angry that he surprised Ethan by directing it at companies that mismanaged their employees and their environment, and last Christmas, when Ethan had a holiday dinner with the guy’s family, Maurice had thrown his hat in with the progressive United Laborer’s Association, a unionized city watchdog group that monitored company holdings in the five boroughs to ensure the fair and equal treatment of their employees as well as their adherence to the EPA’s high environmental standards. The brine turkey was delicious, and the dressing divine; Ethan could tell by the two-story corner lot house that Maurice was pulling down a paycheck more than double what he had been making as a cog in DuPont’s rusty wheels.

“The things you said to me that night,” Maurice said to him after the dinner, while they shared glasses of cognac by his homely fireplace, “really set me straight, Ethan. My life was going nowhere because I had no drive, no focus. I saw everything going on around me, all the wrongs that needed to be righted, but I too alone in my thinking to do anything about it. But when you showed me I wasn’t the only one, it all clicked, it all made sense. Even though you got me canned, you bastard,” he laughed, offering Ethan a celebratory Yuletide cigar, “I guess I owe a lot of this to you. What a world, what a world.”

“Indeed, what a world,” Ethan agreed, his cheeks blushing from the power of cognac and a compliment. To say anything more would have been ungrateful, so he wrapped his lips around the brown stogie and puffed away. Despite the gross toxins in the tobacco, Ethan had always fancied the smell of a cigar.

Yeah, what a world, Ethan stared out the car window at the bluegrass ditches full of stagnant water from last weekend’s downpour. He felt somewhat out of his element, comparing the corrugated metal necks of the stop signs, bent out of shape by drunks driving off the road or aluminum baseball bats wielded by hooligan high school kids, or just out of sheer apathy from being stuck in the dirt and held by a slab of concrete, with the tall, straight, rigid lines he was familiar with along Park Avenue. The street signs and posts and mailboxes and trees and benches and bus stops and high rise buildings all lined up parallel, a beautiful symmetry of brick and gold and leafy foliage and shaped wrought-iron that stretched on for what seemed like miles when you could just sit back and enjoy every sight that passed by: the austere climb of grand old Taliaffero, the kinder school Ethan went to when he was a bright youngster, the Municipal Museum with its broad glass double doors and tiled courtyard, and the strident twelve-story high rise he grew up in, the Waterford, where his mother and father still owned the three mid-level stories he was raised in.

The neighborhood where Ned Bellings lived, East Ridge, stretched on for three blocks that felt like three miles; mobile homes, settled haphazardly in the soil, leaned away from the street, their foundations overrun by tall stalks of monkey grass that looked more like hairy patches than lawn fronts. Lawn furniture was the centerpiece of exterior decorum, sitting on its rounded legs or lying upside down or on its side in creative defiance of utility, as was a dog chained to a wooden post, barking at the passing Gran Prix. A hairy, balding man in a wifebeater lifted his beer bottle to Ethan as he turned the corner into the neighborhood. Ethan waved back timidly through his window.

Ned Bellings’ house, however, 300 Wide Acre Lane, was in a more sessile part of the neighborhood. Pulling into the driveway, he saw the brick foundation and the water glass window, tinted yellow, indicating a basement or lowered den or workshop. The rest of the house was quaint. Wooden finish, painted white, cottage windows and a half-porch with a black-roofed overhang was decorated with hanging plants and surrounded by what looked like rosebushes, empty in their off-season. The house lights were all on inside, as it was already twilight outside. He should have expected an accomplished writer with a very metropolitan sense of literature like Ned to bring a touch of culture to this backwater burg.

Checking his teeth in the rear view mirror and smoothing the soft wave in his hair, Ethan popped a stick of spearmint gum into his mouth and chewed vigorously, sweetening his breath after the oily pastrami sandwich. He straightened his collar, brushed the miniscule flecks of dry bread from his sweater, and walked up to the porch only when he felt at his most presentable.

Exclusive interview, Ethan repeated over and over in his mind, knowing the two words that would be bandied about in connection with his name. Only the real stars get an exclusive interview. Fitting, then, that a Starr should get the opportunity. He rang the doorbell and waited for his ticket to fame to answer.

Check

[EthanStarr]

“I’ve got to admit, Ned, you’re not the kind of guy I had in mind when I set out to interview the Roger Vane,” Ethan laughed, leaning back in the wooden chair. The kitchen’s yellow linoleum spread out beneath the table like a lake of honey, ending when it reached the mottled orange and brown forest of shag carpet in Ned’s den. Ethan had been expecting the faux economy interior of a Beantown writer. Richard was cut from that mold; the last time he had invited Ethan into his downtown flat, a low-end double bedroom coffin, he had made a point of trying to impress Ethan with his sterling silver kitchen set when Ethan knew, after years of growing up at his mother’s hip, that the only kitchenware worth displaying with no utility whatsoever was authentic china. Ned suffered no such artifice. When Ned invited him into the den – yes, the door opened straight onto the den, with no foyer, atrium, or simple hallway to present a homely gallery of visual greetings – Ethan paused to marvel at the sheer amount of junk littering every stretch of counter and shelf space: earthenware dolls imported from St. Petersburg, a row of four black oak cuckoo clocks arranged in order of descending size along the wall, each one set an hour apart from Eastern time to Pacific time, Ethan realized after checking his watch; vintage pulp fiction rags with ten cent stamps on the cover, Coca-Cola paraphernalia, old license plates from different states mounted on the wall, a wall portrait of Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album cover released just last year, a Marilyn Monroe cut-out behind a wooden chest loaded with costume clothing and costume jewelry, newspapers, pizza boxes, fast food wrappers, tons of picture frames with the original sales art slips depicting honeymooning couples, moonlighting couples, and smiling children still behind the glass. Ned’s home was an inventory of collector’s items, a storehouse of one man’s entire life.

Ethan envied Ned for keeping all the details of his experiences when all Ethan had was memories.

“Really?” Ned asked, sitting across the kitchen table from Ethan. His wide fingers drummed a rhythm on the red and white checkered dining cloth. As far as Ethan could tell, Ned had jumped into the liberating 60s movement and had never come out again. Now in his graying fifties, Bellings’ long pepper hair, curled and unwashed, was pulled back into a ponytail by a tie-dye bandana. His eyes, dead set on Ethan, looked bleary and wide behind his thick bifocals. “Well, you were exactly what I expected, Ethan.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” the journalist grinned, removing the black mini-recorder from his pants pocket and setting it on the Italian diner tablecloth.

“As well you should,” Ned lowered his head in acknowledgment, speaking in an aloof, pseudo-intellectual tone that Ethan had never liked but found that he could tolerate in Ned. “I called you for a reason.”

“Oh?” He looked up from the series of questions written in Ethan’s own shorthand on a spiral notepad, more subjects to inquire into than actual point blank queries. Most reporters would be too modest to pursue that statement with gleeful investigation, but Ethan was not like most reporters. “What reason would that be?”

“Your honesty.”

Caught unawares by the planned response, Ethan stared dumbly at Ned Bellings for a moment. Then his thumb clicked the Record button. “My honesty?”

Ned nodded. “Yes. That’s something we both have in common, Ethan: honesty. I made a promise long ago never to lie about anything, and most of all, never to deceive myself.” Lacing his fingers together, he leaned over and confided in the reporter. “That’s the secret to good literature. Honesty. I don’t want to sound like I’m blowing my own horn here, because that’s the last impression I’d want to give the general public…” he trails off, and at Ethan’s nod of understanding, continues. “But my success is predicated upon telling the truth. For example, are you familiar with Bastard Summer?”

Ethan nodded. “Read it from cover to cover last night. Walked down to the bookstore to pick it up after our phone conversation. I wanted to come armed with something.”

“All right, then,” Ned smiled, “would you have been as satisfied with the overall effect if Camilla hadn’t broken it off with David after uncovering his involvement in the murder case? I made it obvious that they were hitting it off well, that they were really digging each other, but when it came right down to solving the crime or jeopardizing it by fraternizing with the suspect’s son, I had to let her make the choice she would make. Yeah, the line of romance I had hoped would build up again never revived after that night at the disco never did, and I couldn’t force it. Were you let down?”

Leaning back in the chair and recalling the details of the novel, which were all fresh in his mind, Ethan waved his hand from side to side. “I did feel a little let down when the loose thread never found its spot in the whole tapestry. You tied it in expertly with the overall theme of bastards and love and the heat, I’ve got to say, but at the same time, I would have been more let down if Camilla had chosen to defy the odds and be selfish. But then again, wasn’t she selfish as it was? I don’t see Camilla as the kind of person who is completely honest with her self. She had a choice of cases, and she chose this string of murders over the kidnappings. Thanks to her father, I think she’s something of a shrew, you know. She stayed on the case because she knew the payoff in solving the crimes would be big, real big. It would make a name for her.”

Ned seemed pleased with the assessment of his work. “Exactly. Would you believe me if I had suggested that Camilla was a person who lacked self-motive? It just wouldn’t make sense, would it?”

“Not at all,” Ethan agreed, nodding his head. “Still, the story was fantastic. All of the details about the murders? The planning? The deceit? It all came down to the heat, for God’s sake, just the heat.”

“Yes, the heat,” Ned nods. “So you understand me, then. Honesty makes it satisfying. The truth makes it real. Sometimes, that truth is ugly, but this is nothing new, least of all to you. I’ve read your work in the New Yorker, in the Times – “

“You get those down here in Jersey?” Ethan interjects with a wry smile, causing Ned to laugh before he continues.

“And you don’t pull any punches. Like that spot in the Village Voice about the OPEC nations and the embargo crisis a couple of years ago. You knew self-interest would force them to lift the embargo.”

Exhibiting some diffidence, Ethan held up his hand. “I was just the mouthpiece for the economists there, really. Nothing ingenious there.”

“Yes, but it was the reasons you cited. The outcome of the Yom Kippur War, both in an economic and a sociopolitical sense, for example. The secrets they held, the history they’ve had. I know you received some flak for that, didn’t you?” Ned seemed genuinely interested in Ethan’s journalistic record, and the interviewer felt his question about why Ned had chosen him had been adequately answered.

“I did, and journalists always will, even long after I’m gone,” Ethan admits. “It comes with the territory. Sure, the truth brings you success, but it also pisses a lot of people off, too.”

“Granted,” Ned smiled, settling back down into his chair and waving his hand at Ethan. “So, by all means, let’s get this started. You want a drink first? I’ve got a bottle of rum in the cabinet and a few Coke cans in the fridge.”

Ethan smiled. “That would be fantastic. I’ll have mine with a few rocks. So, tell me about Hoboken, where everything started for you.”

The rest of the night rolled on like well-oiled clockwork, greased so perfectly that it sprouted wings and flew out of Ethan’s hands sooner than he had anticipated. He had begun with aplomb, having taken so many interviews by this point that no touch of anxiety caused him to stumble, to trip, or to hesitate. In fact, Ethan did not have to guide the interview with a subtle hand, as one must at times with an unwilling, an unwitting, or an outright oblivious subject. Ned Bellings was adept at telling his story, and the details of his life, from his upbringing and his first marriage in Hoboken to the messy divorce and his exodus from the Midwest to his first big breakthrough in the publishing world all meshed together like a beautiful story of its own, complete with dramatic moments, epiphanies, difficult choices, good times and bad times and, somewhere in the particulars of his extensive travels across the country, a bit of poetic justice, a literary virility that seduced Ethan. Eventually, he abandoned his notes and simply listened, interacted, and turned Ned’s life into a full blown conversation that led them into discussing politics, faith, religion, life and death, and matters far more personal than Ethan would have been comfortable discussing on a first meeting. Maybe it was the fact that Ethan knew he would not likely speak to Ned again once the interview was submitted and published. By the time Ned started talking about New Jersey, he interrupted the interview, which had already progressed well into the night. The last cuckoo clock that twittered, the one that hang over and had the last say, the twelfth tweet, was the smallest of them all, the one for Eastern time. It was after midnight.

“You smoke, Ethan?” the author asked, leaning back in his chair and reaching across a basket loaded with record albums to pull open a drawer on a dresser against the kitchen wall. Spare change and foreign coins, mostly Mexican and Canadian currency, were scattered over the top, and Ned produced a small bag of oregano-green hash and dropped it in the center of the table. “Or, if not, you mind if I do?” he asked politely, digging into the same drawer for a brown blown-glass bowl. Brilliant orange mist swirled in the glassy surface, reminding Ethan of the shag carpet just a few feet away.

“To be honest,” he said, causing the two of them to laugh at the private reference, “I’ve only had the seedless stuff. A few years ago, in California, the sensemillia way was the only sensible way.”

“Whew,” Ned lifted his eyebrows. “I never went there with the stuff. You know that eating it brings out the psychoactive agents big time, right?” he asked, gingerly taking pinches out of the bag and setting them in the bowl. “That’s the West Coast for you, though.”

“It sure was,” Ethan agreed, accepting the offered pipe after Ned had taken his own draw. Just mentioning his sabbatical to the lower valleys, the wine country and the long beaches brought back a flood of memories that came rushing into his mind just as the cannabis smoke came rushing into his lungs. When he uncovered the carb with his thumb and handed it back to Ned, Ethan struggled not to choke on the old familiar poison. The smell launched up into his nostrils and reminded him of that beach house on the Catalina coast, the boys out of class for the summer and living the good life out on the island. One trip every weekend to the mainland, for three days of partying and so that Ethan could drop off the freelance assignments he’d picked up on behalf of one publication or another, pulling in enough money every week to buy what his parents had been too frugal to spend their own hard-earned money on: his happiness. But even through the good feelings and the haze and the strange occurrences he’d probably never tell his father about, Ethan never failed to tuck away a published article into his personal portfolio. By the time he left California to return to the familiar trappings of New York life, the hemp satchel, loaded up with hard copies of freelance, thoughtless, and yet still marginally successful articles, made him realize that even though he’d wanted nothing more than to live for the moment, he’d been keeping his future in mind the entire time.

But those concerns weren’t weighing on him now, as he loosened up and let the hash work its magic. He was older now, more confident than he was in those early years at Columbia before leaving the state. And as it was, the amount of juicy information he’d just received from Ned Bellings, famed mystery author that no one in the world truly knew but Ethan would give Ethan a reason to boost his confidence even more. What independents would want to pick up this interview? Who would be the next person to contact him for an interview? Could he coerce Ned into speaking on National Public Radio, and if not conduct the interview himself, could Ethan at least weasel his name into the interview? Surely he would, for Ethan would proudly carry the honor of this exclusive interview.

The conversation became even more personal that it had been previously. It became more comical, more hungry for information and life stories on both sides, just as Ethan and Ned both grew hungry for the potato chips and Vienna sausages and mustard kept in Ned’s kitchen cabinet. Ethan even idly wondered if Ned would ask him to stay the night over. It didn’t look to the reporter like Ned had any rooms to spare, but he was feeling so euphoric that he’d be happy just to crash on the couch, or better yet in the firm, soft expanse of shag in the den.

“It’s getting late,” Ned pointed out, a fact Ethan had completely forgotten about.

Rubbing his bleary eyes, Ethan glanced back into the den at the face of the cuckoo cocks. “Shit, so it is, so it is!” he said hastily, swiping the last of a wriggling raw sausage into the pool of mustard sitting at the bottom of the small can. “At this rate, I’ll probably make it back to Manhattan in time to see the sun rise. It’ll be fucking beautiful, Ned. Unless I’m by the East River, and then it’ll be just shitty.”

“It’ll be something to write about, for sure.” The words sink in, and Ethan marvels at the thought. Ned was right. It would be the kind of poetic moment Frost would have killed for. “If you do write something, send it to me?”

“Agreed, Ned,” Ethan reached out to shake the author’s hand. But the shake turned into an uncomfortable but not awkward embrace as he bridged the distance between them and wrapped his arms around Ned’s homebody girth. “God damn, this has been fabulous.”

“Its not over just yet,” Ned smiled, methodically cleaning out the bowl of the pipe. Ethan had held it in his hand for the majority of the night.

“No?” Ethan asked, giddy in the knowledge that his night wasn’t concluding yet. “What, you have something else juicy to tell me about?”

“You could say that,” the literate orchestrator of murder dipped his head, reaching out to press the red stop button on the recorder.

---

Half an hour later, Ethan Starr hobbled through Ned’s front door, his sweater slung over his arm and his collar unbuttoned. A sheen of sweat, caught in the high moonlight, glistened on his bronze cheeks and his forehead. Tachycardia whipped his heart into overtime, forcing him to breathe raggedly through his nostrils. He grabbed for the railing and overshot the distance by a foot or so, plunging his open palm into the rose bushes. Thorns scratched at his cuticles and his knuckles. Dull to the pain, he drew the hand away and skipped down the wooden steps and made a direct line for his Gran Prix. The sound of the porch door swinging open sent a shiver down his spine, and he reflexively looked over his shoulder. His eyes were wide, his lips parted in wordless fear.

“Have a safe drive back to New York,” Ned Bellings called after Ethan from the porch, crossing his short arms over his chest. There was a strong touch of sadness in the author’s voice that panicked Ethan, and he slammed the driver’s side door to mute anything else the man might have to say. The interview was over.

He turned on the car, pulled out of the driveway, sped out to the main causeway and only then remembered to flick his headlights on. The milky light spilled out over the dark streets and flashed off the broken windows of the liquor store; the reflections caused Ethan to gasp and look out his window, and then shake his head and put his foot on the accelerator even harder. The last half hour, spent in Ned Bellings’ kitchen, repeated itself over and over again like a tape recorder on replay. He glanced aside at the small recorder in the passenger seat, and the sight of it alone brought the unreasoning reaction out of his guts. His head was heavy from the words, the horrible revelations that he couldn’t shake from his mind but his head also wanted to be light and free as a feather thanks to the marijuana. The tension soon became too much for the latent drug to handle, and Ethan swerved his car into the oncoming traffic lane and off onto the shoulder, where he threw open his door, stumbled pitifully out into the grass, toppled onto his knees, and whimpering, scuttled onto the harsh, rough sand on the shoreline. He vomited into the foul-smelling water, which lapped sluggishly on the beach like spilled oil, and started crying into his hands. Vomiting, then wiping his eyes clear of tears, and then retching again while his body shivered in the cold night air.

If he weren’t so scared of being alone at that moment, he would be happy that no one was there to witness him.

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[EthanStarr]

November 21st, 1976

The ashtray on Bill Moony’s wide and cluttered desk looked like a miniature glass mausoleum, its stiff white occupants crumpled from use and yellowing with age. Ethan sat straight but wearied in a creaky, armless chair on the staff writer’s side of the Chief Editor’s desk, wondering at Moony’s habit of lining up the day’s discarded cigarettes parallel to one another, buried in their own gray ashes and reeking of tobacco and tar on a funeral pyre.

“You know why I hauled you in here, Ethan?” Moony huffed, executing his Newport on the corpses of the morning shift’s neurotically chain-murdered victims.

“Because it gets lonely in the corner office?” Ethan fired back, on the ball, watching nicotine-laced incense rise from the black-bottomed tomb.

Bill Moony shook his stubby hand at Ethan, his fingers sweeping back and forth like a Mafia don whose hand moves too fast to kiss. Raised as a bambino in Little Italy, Moony had the greasy black mustache and the love for cheap suits capable of weathering the rain as well as a mugging in a back alley, features that conspired to stereotype him as a greaseball. The editor of the New York Times commanded more power than respect, even with a decade under his belt as the Editor-in-Chief. Staff writers whispered about his connections in the city, for Moony had a way with fact checking. Nothing got past him, and the price for stretching the truth in a piece one inch resulted in having to stretch a final paycheck one full month until you could get packed up, moved out, and land a mediocre typesetting job in Buffalo or Philadelphia. Breaking Moony’s number one law of accuracy meant you’d never work the boroughs again, for the man had a frightening knack for turning a sparkling resume into a scarlet letter. A sports editor once compared Moony’s fact checking method to a parade of goombas out of Brooklyn knocking down the doors of every smalltime paper and publishing house in New York, insuring their meager prosperity so long as Moony’s will be done, in Moony nomen, amen. Last Ethan heard, that editor was covering little league tournaments for the Scuttlebutt community newspaper out in Lancaster.

“Save the wit for the day you get your own feature column,” Moony brushed off Ethan’s sarcasm. He dealt with the same sense of humor from most everyone on staff. “It ain’t because you’ve done anything wrong. On the contrary, you’re perfect, in your craft, expression, style, and tenacity in reporting. You know how to work an angle and cull the details out of a scoop. That little piece last week about the Republican staffers in Harlem moving the voting precincts last minute to the police station was fantastic. Sure, you pissed off some of our conservative readers, but I got a call from the NAACP. They were pleased,” he smiles, his broad, yellow teeth causing Ethan to grimace inwardly. They bothered him almost as much as the though that he’d gotten hate mail from the New York Times’ Republican readers. The police shifted the voting booths from the movie theater to the precinct after a threat of gang violence by the Panthers. The next day, blacks across Harlem arrived at the theater to find it empty, and those who came early enough in the day to find that the booths had been moved to the police station didn’t want to hang out around the pig sty. Ethan went sniffing through the trough days later, pressuring the runts to squeal, until he dug out a tasty truffle: no threat had ever been officially filed as an incident report. During Moony’s fact checking, the Chief cited that the threat was made to a uniformed officer and therefore never had need to be filed in the paperwork by an outside party. The story was printed with the defensive response, and even though Ethan didn’t take them to the slaughterhouse, he still pointed out the mud on their hooves.

“So what is this about, if not my performance?” Ethan inquired. Pinpricks flourished across his brow. How deeply had Moony fact checked his interview with Bellings? The reporter tightening his grip on the arms of the chair, watching the broom closet behind the Editor’s desk and listening for the door behind him to open and close gently like it does in Dragnet when the cops come to slap the cuffs on.

Moony clasped his hands together. “That’s just it, Ethan. This is about your performance. Not on the page, but with the staff.” He took one of those deep, rattling breaths that always made Ethan sink further into his chair; it was a tell tale sign that Moony had all this mapped out before ever calling Ethan into the office. “Tell me straight. Is everything all right with you? Do you like the job?”

Surprised by the question, Ethan hesitated before responding. “Sure it is, Moony. This is a gig I’ve been trying to land since before I left Columbia.”

“Then why are you so stand-offish with the boys, Ethan? The staff of this paper works better as pals than co-workers. Just like we gotta keep up a trustworthy image for our readers, we’ve also gotta keep things copasetic between each other. Clarence is an open guy. Ira, too. Even Richard’s got some personality when he isn’t being a cold fish. I had thought you’d get along here. I hired you because of that Bellings interview, and it took some real person skills to eke that one out, you know what I mean?”

Not really, Ethan thought gravely. While Moony spoke, he’d been reflecting on how he got himself into this situation at all. After composing himself, Ethan came back to New York, wrote up the interview, edited out exactly what Ned wanted him to and nothing more, and then submitted it to Moony the next day. It ended up being the big break Ethan wanted, and got more than just his foot in the door. A week later he was pulling a staff writer’s paycheck with more steady work at hand than one person can manage. The deal soured somewhat when he arrived for work on the first day to find that Richard Reuters had also landed an equal position thanks to his coverage of that shooting in Brooklyn, but Ethan didn’t mind having him around so much because it validated his dislike of the man when the rest of the staff, Chief Editor included, recognized what a bore he could be. From the way Moony was talking, though, Ethan was sounding like the more unimpressive candidate.

“You hardly talk to anyone. I didn’t see you at the party we threw after the election,” Moony continued. Ethan had every reason to be there: Carter had been his candidate, even if Mr. Smiley was a backwoods southerner, and there was plenty for Ethan to celebrate with the knowledge that even the Harlem precinct’s prejudice couldn’t keep Jimmy from taking the state. On the other side of the coin, Ford wasn’t much of contender after pardoning that sly Quaker and receiving his karmic payback every time he stepped out of a god damn airplane. Ethan was convinced the guy wouldn’t survive another term and would meet his demise on the tarmac before his first executive vacation. The liberal staff at the Times, Reuters excluded, had thrown a private pressroom party that night after the announcements, but Ethan had stayed at home, sleepless and glued to his television with a quart of chocolate ice cream and a locked door. “You’re always out hunting stories and writing them up at home. The rest of the guys spend a little time around the pressroom for the company. People are starting to talk, son. They think you think you’re too good for them. Your father’s the DA, your mother a Party mouthpiece? You live in West Central? Do you follow me at all here, Ethan?”

“Yes! Yes, I do,” Ethan blurted anxiously. Now he’d actually begun to sweat, and wiping at his upper lip, wondered what everyone was saying on the other side of that closed door with the frosted window bearing Moony’s name in black paint. Were those shadows coming in through the glass, people waiting outside to talk to Ethan after the meeting?

“I always knew better, though. At least I thought I did before I had to haul you in here. You stick out your neck a lot. I know, I checked your portfolio thoroughly. That’s not the MO of a stuck-up prick.” Seeing that he’d gotten through to Ethan, who was obviously writhing in disquiet across the broad desk, Moony dropped his inquisition and laid out his wants in plain language. “Lighten up a little. Talk to the boys. Settle whatever issues you’ve got in your personal life so that you can contribute to the atmosphere I want to have around here. Capiche?”

“Si,” Ethan nodded, sitting frozen in the chair.

The editor-in-chief lit up another cigarette and leaned back in his reclining, cushioned seat. “You can go back now,” he smirked, lighting up another stick and exhaling plumes of smoke through his wide nostrils.

“All right,” Ethan rose hastily and moved for the door. “I could use a cup of coffee and a donut. Ira brought some in this morning.”

“There you go,” Moony grinned, pointing the lit end of the cigarette at Ethan like the end of a smoking barrel. Ethan closed the door gently. His scream came out as a sight of reluctant relief. Moony, damnit, if only you knew all the facts…

It came as a surprise when, as he turned about to face the pressroom, he found himself wishing Moony – or anyone, for that matter – knew all the facts.

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[EthanStarr]

Moony’s threat to shape up or ship out still scraping his back like sandpaper, Ethan Starr took out his frustration on his workstation, sweeping aside stale Styrofoam cups and candy bar wrappers and a spilled box of Tiddlywinks that Ethan tinkered at while constructing a good lead and header in his head. “Where’s the damn Rolodex?” Timid hands picked through last week’s staff memorandums and the haphazard collection of folded cocktail napkins, index cards, and scrap paper littering the desktop like new fallen snow. They were phone numbers and personal information that he hadn’t yet added into his Rolodex, numbers from reliable news sources and potential lays picked up at the Manhattan disco scene alike. How he differentiated one from another was beyond him, but he managed to keep them separate in his memory, if not on his desk. Dialing up Lady Bump for a midnight hustle and getting the sixty-seven year old dinosaur heading the New York chapter of the Baptist Woman’s Conference would be a gross embarrassment. The only thing worse would be if she took him up on the offer.

Vexed by the peculiar absence of his Rolodex but too rattled to move every last box of stationery or the portable 7-inch TV/radio to find it, Ethan abandoned his fruitless search and walked across the loud and obnoxious press room floor to the break room. Leroy and Sal sat inside at the folding table, looking bedraggled by the morning rush. Reuters, one of the other break room cronies, wasn’t there. At least one detail of an otherwise troubling morning had worked into Ethan’s favor.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Ethan overemphasized, keeping Moony’s request in mind enough to mock it behind his back. “Cheerio, pip pip, top of the morning and all that jazz. Wot say I bring in crumpets and bagels for the morrow’s brunch?” he asks, dropping a quarter into the soda machine.

Leroy and Sal exchanged glanced with each other. It was Sal who finally spoke up. “Get the talk from Moony, did you? I got that, too. Told him right there, Hell, Moony, I grew up a Hasidic Jew in an orthodox Brooklyn neighborhood, and you want me to be gentile? Oi.”

“Bullshit,” Leroy countered in his deep negro burlesque. “You ain’t done no such thing. You sat there and said, yessuh, yessuh!, that’s what you did.”

“Hm,” he assented, wiping cream cheese from his lips after a bite of bagel. “Guilty as charged. I can’t even tell my own mother to stop frying latkas for every girl I bring home. Not everyone likes Jewish food.”

The Coca-Cola can hissed as Ethan pulled back the aluminum tab. The last thing he wanted to do was sit there and jive talk with his co-workers (alternately co-conspirators or in camaraderie depending on who gets the next day’s headliner), but what else was there to do? Sit at the apartment alone again, unable to muster up the presence to walk outside, getting absolutely sick of Antonio’s mushroom calzones and Chinese take-out?

“I told it like it was in there,” Ethan said, wincing at the carbonate burn sizzling in his throat like he’d swallowed a hot coal. Like Portia, or that schoolteacher murdered in Ned’s Bastard Summer. The sobering thought put Ethan into an unsettling quiet that he didn’t come out of until he noticed Leroy and Sal waiting for him to go on. “I bent over the desk and let him have his way with me.” The others laughed. “I only just landed this gig with the Times,” he continues, calling the job a gig as though he were Frank Sinatra crooning at a corner pocket Blues Bar on the South End. “I’d really hate to blow it because I’m not willing to conform to press floor politics.”

Again, Leroy and Sal laughed, but they knew that Moony was doing more than throwing his weight around; Ethan had been an office recluse ever since landing the staff writer position, and neither of them had ever known Ethan to be distant or to avoid his acquaintances with lame excuses like chasing a lead that he could just call on or writing better at home even though all of his resources were at his desk. Back at LaGuardia High in ’69, Leroy and Ethan developed a good friendship. They’d known about one another for some time prior since Leroy’s father worked as an NAACP legal consultant planted in District Attorney Wade Starr’s office. In their senior year, Leroy was captain of the basketball team and Ethan played catcher for LaGuardia’s baseball team. The two had plenty to talk about with each other at the high school’s Sports Association, especially in February when parents got in an uproar over the fact that the last white player on Leroy’s team, the son of a German diplomat at the UN, left to return to Berlin and his spot was filled by a black freshman from south Manhattan. It was the first time in the school’s history that the basketball team was entirely negro; the coach’s choice was called into question, the parents of athletic white students clamored about why their own stuck-up silver spoons were overlooked, and poor Leroy at 18 was caught up in the middle of the racial shitstorm. Leroy played it cool, claiming the decision was never his and that he had no trouble with whom the coach chose so long as the new jersey could play well in a fast break and sink free throws. It wasn’t until the school’s Sports Association had to get involved that Ethan shared his opinion with more than just Leroy.

As leader of the debate team, Ethan was chosen to address school officials, concerned parents, and a small media panel with the Sports Association’s formal opinion, and the young Starr did his homework. It was the first time Leroy received an honest taste of Ethan’s racial sensibility, and his empathy for New York’s black community. Ethan spent a week talking to, getting to know, and ultimately befriending JC, the black freshman at the center of the controversy. When Ethan addressed the audience, he began by reading from the sports handbook, quoting a passage that enabled a coach to select the highest quality players of his own choosing regardless of race, creed, nationality, and so forth. It was when he delivered an astounding timeline of JC’s basketball history, including the facts that his father had shot hoops for five years in a college team, that JC had been playing street and community basketball since he was six years old, and how JC’s gameplay records, acquired from the officials in the community league, surpassed the to-date records in 2- and 3-point shots and low foul rate of over half of La Guardia High School’s varsity basketball team. JC was thrilled to have his name up in lights, and so were Leroy and the coach, at least for a while; halfway through the season, JC got a big head over the praise, but they couldn’t hold that against Ethan. Afterwards, Leroy and Ethan hung out a good deal, talked about what they wanted out of life, and even played some street ball, Ethan receiving no end of honky jokes from the other courtsmiths. They got even closer when Leroy’s father was caught screwing a white woman. His parents divorced and without his father’s support, Leroy and his ma had to move back into Harlem where he’d grown up. Ethan still made the trek from Park Avenue all the way to Harlem just to visit.

Now it seemed Ethan didn’t want much to do with Leroy or anyone else at the office. Leroy had only kept up contact for another year or so until Ethan moved to California. The NY Times was the first place they’d met in five or six years, and although they’d reminisced about old times, Ethan’s heart hadn’t been in it. It was enough to make Leroy think the WASP was finally showing.

Sal, on the other hand, hadn’t known Ethan until their first year together as freshman at the Columbia University dormitory. The two had not originally been roomed together, but on the second night of classes, when Sal walked in on his assigned roommate lying out on his single reading a hardback of Mein Kampf, the Jew didn’t take any chances and put in for an immediate transfer. Ethan had used nepotistic pull to acquire a nice dorm room all to himself – it helped that his mother had been a star graduate from Columbia’s sister school, Barnard Woman’s College on the north end of Manhattan – so that he could live college life to the fullest without a bothersome roommate in his way. The RA’s sob story convinced Ethan to open his doors grudgingly to the picky Jew. Their relationship blossomed quickly; Sal had wanted a friend, and Ethan had wanted a less attractive and unadventurous sidekick to make him look better by comparison, so they wasted no time getting heavily involved in a prestigious fraternity and embarking on a freshman joy ride. It almost ended prematurely. Sal caught his new Aryan roommate also reading a copy of Mein Kampft, but before he could slip off, Ethan explained that the advanced literature course students had been assigned Hitler’s memoir as an introductory text.

“Well, that makes me feel sheepish,” Sal admitted, chagrin.

“Don’t be,” Ethan won him over with a perfect grin. “We’re going to have a great time.”

Ethan did have a great time. Sal experienced Ethan’s vitality and virility vicariously, and he mostly had a good time when he wasn’t throwing up in the bathroom after trying to keep pace with Ethan’s bottles of spiced rum and tequila shots or trying to sleep or study during Ethan’s makeout sessions with one of the feminists from Barnard, or some local cocktail waitress serving jell-o shots at the rathskellar. By the time finals rolled around, they knew a good deal about each other, and Sal felt that his horizons had broadened. It took him by surprise when Ethan offered to join his family for Hanukkah and even offered to light a candle on the menorah. By the eight day, Sals’ sister Edie had fallen head-over-heels for his roommate, and the two started dating.

Ethan’s friendship with Sal and his relationship with Edie ended all at once when Ethan announced he wouldn’t be seeking a sophomore year at Columbia. He would be leaving for California instead, he said, to pursue a career in beat journalism. Sal, also a student in the same field, accused Ethan of going gonzo; Ethan accused him of being related to a girl who was naive enough to talk marriage after less than a year of dating. Amicably parted, Ethan and Sal had only recently reunited after the Bellings interview, published as the Mystery Writer interview by Ned’s request, had earned Ethan enough credibility to be hired onto the NY Times. Sal couldn’t have waited any longer. He hadn’t experienced the kind of fun Ethan could be since his freshman year at Columbia. But Ethan was a changed man, no longer as personable as he had been. Maybe he’d gone completely goyim at last.

The yawning silence in the break room broke beneath an ever greater quiet who breezed through the door like Shakespeare’s Malvolio, right down to the blank, lazy eyes and the dismissive sideways glance.

“Hey, Richard,” Sal greeted around a mouthful of bagel.

“Hey, Richard,” nodded Leroy simultaneously, watching his ponderous amble to the refrigerator.

“Hey, Dick,” Ethan tipped his soda from side to side like it were a martini. Leroy laughed. Sal snickered. Not many had the audacity to play games with a man has humorless as Richard Reuters.

“Hello Sal, Leory. Ethan,” Reuters quipped his name tersely, removing a plastic case of bland egg salad from the fridge, the deli’s $1.99 sticker still on the cover. “Congratulations on finally catching up to the rest of us. You must be feeling quite at home.”

“Quite at home, yes,” Ethan echoes. “And more than – “ he starts into another witticism before Richard swipes his white plastic fork through the air, an egg-and-mayo dolloped end pointed straight at Ethan.

“Then leave the tramps you pick up at your damn disco joints a home phone number, would you please, so that they don’t come here, to this place of business, and bug your co-workers with a taxing game of twenty questions?”

Visibly startled, Ethan set his coke can on the counter. “Wait, what the hell are you talking about? I haven’t been to the discotech in a month, at least not since I got back from Jersey!”

“Then you must be in some kind of legal trouble,” Richard observes, in his arrogant Sherlock-to-Watson way that he was so good at impressing. “She was more than curious, she was downright nosy, rifling through that landfill you call a desk. I fetched security, but she was gone by the time we came back into the press room. Where are you going so fast?”

Leroy and Sal shared troubled glances as Ethan bolted for the door, leaving his soda can half-empty on the break room table.

“He’s really gone downhill,” Richard sits down, voicing the intimate concern that neither Leroy nor Sal could say, and twice as bluntly if they could.

“No shit, Sherlock.” The black man pushed up from the table and left without another word to Reuters. Sal just sat and smiled until the silence grew uncomfortable, and reluctantly deciding he’d goofed off enough, got back to work on a slow news day.

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