The Reporter

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREETwo weeks after his first byline, Jesse got his first chance to cover the police beat. Glen Barns made it happen by calling in sick on a Thursday, twenty minutes after the two o’clock starting time for reporters. His unscheduled absence would leave Weatherly no choice but to throw Jesse into the fray.

Weatherly put both hands on Jesse’s desk. Ash from his cigarette fell onto the typewriter. “Jesse, you’re all I’ve got to take the police beat today. Glen’s out and everybody else is on assignment. Can you handle it?”

Jesse had jumped up from his chair and tried to sound confident. “No problem, Mr. Weatherly. I’ll get on it right away. I know the beat. I’ll start at the lockup, then make my way up to the city detective bureau, and head over to the County Sheriff’s office at the jail. Glen filled me in on everything.” Jesse understood that police reporters had to make the rounds of their sources in order to find out what was happening in the world of cops and robbers.

Weatherly grunted, “Don’t go over there acting like you own the place. Some of those cops have been at it for thirty years. They don’t need some hippy-dippy kid fresh out of college asking too many questions. Do more listening than talking. You got two ears and only one mouth. You understand what I’m saying?”

Jesse nodded without saying a word.

A smile began to form on Weatherly’s face as he nodded in appreciation of Jesse’s silence, but he caught himself and reverted to a tight-lipped grimace. “By the way, they found a body in Foster Park. It came across the police scanner about an hour ago.”

Jesse tried to act cool as he grabbed a pen and notebook, headed out the newsroom door, and walked three blocks to the nine-story City-County Building. His mind raced. A body found? Oh s**t, this is a murder. It’s big, front page. Maybe I should call Glen. No, I can do this. This is my chance. I can’t freak out.

He entered the building and walked down a long flight of metal stairs. No one answered the call button at the basement lockup window. Prisoners were processed there before being transferred to the jail. It was as good a place as any to start looking for a body. Jesse looked through the bars and the bulletproof glass of the window and saw a confinement officer talking on the telephone with his back to the window. Jesse waited until the officer hung up before buzzing him again. The officer got up slowly and shuffled to the window. He shook his head obviously annoyed by the intrusion.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Jesse Conover from the Journal Gazette. The police radio says they found a body. Can you tell me where it is?”

The officer didn’t ask for identification. He raised his head slightly at the mention of the newspaper and became reluctantly helpful. “Check the coroner’s unit, down the hall to your right. They wheeled her in about an hour ago.”

So it’s a woman, he thought. Or a girl. He tried to stay calm and remind himself that he was a reporter even if he didn’t feel like one yet.

Jesse walked down the hall slowly and paused in front of a double door. It didn’t say “coroner” anywhere, but it was the only entrance wide enough to accommodate a gurney.

Jesse listened and heard no one inside. He looked both ways down the hall. He was alone; the area was eerily quiet. He detected the scent of rubbing alcohol and human feces in the air. Hopefully, they hadn’t started an autopsy. The only dead body he’d ever seen had been in a casket at a funeral, nice and neat and fully clothed with no blood anywhere. There was no telling what lay behind those doors. He wasn’t even sure he would be allowed entry. It could be a crime to walk in on a dead person. He took a deep breath and pushed on the doors. Unlocked. They made a whooshing sound as they opened and closed behind him.

There was no one in the room except for a woman in her early twenties lying on the table with both arms outstretched as if she was about to hug somebody. Jesse thought she was alive at first until he approached the table and realized her arms were frozen in rigor mortis. Her left eye was half open but there was clearly nobody home. Jesse imagined the corpse springing to life and trying to strangle him. He wanted to run out of the room, but he knew he couldn’t.

The woman was fully clothed except for bare feet. Her mouth was closed with a hint of faded lipstick on her lips. She was pretty, or at least she used to be. Her frozen face was expressionless. It had been wiped clean. There was dirt and dried grass in her blonde hair. Jesse was looking for signs of trauma when a man in medical scrubs walked through a back door and yelped loudly in surprise at seeing a live person in the room.

“What are you doing in here?”

Jesse jumped at the sudden intrusion. He recovered quickly and tried to act nonchalant. “I’m a reporter for the Journal Gazette. I heard you had her in here, and I was wondering how she died.”

“Well, good,” the man said. “You scared the crap out of me. You’re not supposed to be in here, you know.” The man paused and looked at the corpse. He looked back at Jesse with lips pursed and eyebrows raised like he was thinking about answering the cause of death question. Jesse saw his chance and came at him with a slightly different angle of questioning.

“Are you the coroner?” Jesse asked.

“No, I’m a pathologist assisting the coroner on this case.”

Jesse nodded as the doctor invited him to the other side of the table. Never underestimate the power of asking the right questions, he thought.

The doctor puffed his cheeks as he let out a deep breath and nodded his head. “All right. I’ll tell you. People have a right to know, I guess. But you can’t tell anyone we had this conversation.”

“Off the record, doctor. Strictly off the record.”

Without saying another word, the doctor used both hands to turn the woman’s head to her right. The back of her head had been blown off and what was left of her brains began oozing out onto the table. The doctor rotated her head back as Jesse doubled over and barely kept himself from puking into a container that was already half filled with blood and human tissue.

“First time, eh?” the doctor said. “Surprised you didn’t blow lunch. I think we can safely say she put a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.”

The room was spinning as Jesse straightened up. “What was her name?”

“You’ll have to ask the detective about that. And you know they won’t release the name until the next of kin have been notified. So, get out of here for now and remember what you saw so next time you won’t go nosing around a medical facility without permission.”

Jesse’s knees were shaking as he stumbled out the doors, down the hall, and up the stairs to the fresh air of the afternoon. It crossed his mind that he might not have the stomach for the job. He had never considered how much blood and guts would be involved in the daily upheavals of a modern city.

Before he had time to dwell on the wrenching sloppiness of violent death, his curiosity saved him from despair as questions popped into his mind. Who was that poor woman, and what happened that would make her kill herself? Maybe someone put the gun in her mouth to make it look like suicide. What would her mother think?

Jesse went back in the building and up to the fourth floor to the detective bureau and knocked on the open-door frame. There was only one person in the room, a broad-shouldered man with a bald head bent down within inches of the desktop. He was filling in a form and took his time before looking up to acknowledge the interruption. Jesse introduced himself and asked about the dead woman.

The detective shook his head. “Sorry, pal. It’s not front-page news, just another suicide. She left a note. Bunch of bullshit about how depressed she was. And, no, I can’t tell you her name until we notify her people.”

Jesse wasn’t about to be summarily dismissed. “Can I see the note?”

The detective hung his head in exasperation. “No, you can’t see the note. It’s evidence in an ongoing investigation. And if I showed you the note, you’d know who she is, wouldn’t you?”

Jesse left the detective bureau and walked down the hall in a dejected frame of mind. The story wasn’t even an obit yet. The cop was right. Kill yourself, no story. Kill somebody else, front page news.

Just then, the door flew open and slammed against the wall. The detective he’d been talking to came running out, strapping on the shoulder holster for his 9 mm handgun as he ran. “Robbery in progress, First Bank, downtown, shots fired!” he shouted at Jesse.

Jesse kept up with the cop as he ran for three blocks to the bank. Squad cars surrounded the crime scene with screaming sirens and flashing lights. Two masked robbers had fled on foot. A manhunt was underway as Jesse followed the detective into the bank. People were standing around, frozen in place, still in shock. A middle-aged female teller staggered from behind the counters with blood gushing from her right upper arm. She had been shot. A male customer was lying slumped in a pool of his own blood on the floor in front of the main counter.

The wounded female teller lurched around the counter and headed straight for Jesse with outstretched arms. He wondered what he had done to attract her attention. He had never seen the woman before, but he was the first person in her path. She stumbled as she got within reach and fell into his arms, smearing blood all over his shirt.

Jesse laid her down as gently as he could and put his hand over the gunshot wound to apply pressure. He switched hands on the wound and wiped his brow. Her blood dribbled down his face. It tasted like sweaty wine. She was gasping for breath as she looked into his eyes. “I told him he couldn’t have the money. I told him no. This is all my fault. I should have just given him the money. He wouldn’t have started shooting if I had just given him the money.”

The woman strained her neck to look at the man lying on the floor. He was motionless but still clutching a wallet in his right hand. “Is he dead? Can you see? Is he gone? Oh, please, God. Tell me he’s not dead.”

“He’s going to be fine,” Jesse said, not knowing if it was true. “What did the guy who shot you look like?”

“He was wearing a mask over his nose and mouth. I could see his eyes. They were evil. It looked like he came from hell. He was a young white guy and he was high on something. He was jumpy and angry, and then he started shooting when I wouldn’t give him the money.” She closed her eyes and sobbed. “I saw the fire come out of his gun. Am I going to die? My whole left side is going numb. Why didn’t I just give him the money?”

Jesse kept one hand over the gunshot wound and stroked her head with the other. “You’re going to make it. Look, here comes help.”

Paramedics rushed into the bank and raced over to Jesse and the woman. They told him to lie down on the floor, thinking he was a gunshot victim, while they took over treating the woman.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said, and scooted away. Blood covered his shirt and hands.

The woman moaned incoherently before passing out. Jesse watched to make sure she was still breathing as they loaded her onto a stretcher and hauled her out to an ambulance in front of the glass doors of the bank. The wounded customer looked like he might regain consciousness as medics were treating him. Jesse thought he saw him move the hand that still clutched his wallet. The robbers must have been in too much of a panic to grab it.

A female medic turned her attention to Jesse. It took some talking, but Jesse convinced her he was a newspaper reporter, and that the blood all over his shirt was not his own. As he stood up to demonstrate he wasn’t injured, he saw Chuck Macy, the school reporter, running toward him. He arrived out of breath and looked like he might pass out from looking at the blood all over Jesse and puddling on the floor.

“Weatherly figured you’d be on the scene. He sent me over to help with the story. Looks like you could use a little.”

Jesse held his arms out to his sides. “I’m fine. The teller who got shot bled all over me, that’s all. She said the robber was a white male, in his twenties, high as a kite. He started shooting when she wouldn’t hand over the money.”

Chuck looked around the bank, taking stock of the situation. “Okay, here’s what we do. I’ll interview the cops and see if they catch the robbers; you go talk to the tellers. Try to get their names and numbers so we can follow up later. See if you can get a quote from the manager. Find out what the robbers stole. Looks like the whole thing blew up before they got any cash. Find out how many of them there were. Ask about cameras. Tell them we’ll run photos to help catch the creeps.”

Chuck turned to leave and then looked back at Jesse. “Sure you’re okay?” Jesse nodded. “You got this?” Jesse nodded again. “You take the tellers and I take the cops?” Jesse nodded a third time, amazed that Chuck could be so organized in such a chaotic situation.

Jesse began interviewing tellers and filled up his notebook with names and numbers and quotes. Bank employees were eager to talk until the manager came to his senses and corralled them into his office for a meeting. A camera crew from each of the three television stations arrived too late to talk to the bank staff. Two radio station reporters tried to interview Jesse until they realized he was a newspaper reporter who wasn’t about to share his story.

When Jesse got back to the office, Weatherly stood up and dropped papers on the floor when he saw him covered in blood.

“What the hell happened to you?” Weatherly asked.

Jesse explained what had happened. “The teller who got shot is blaming herself for the whole thing because she refused to hand over the money. They took her and the other victim to St. Joseph Hospital.”

Weatherly sat down and put his hands on his head. “You interviewed her as she was bleeding all over you?” Jesse nodded. “That’s good work, kid. That’s what I call keeping your head in the game. Not bad at all for your first day covering cops. Now get cleaned up and get yourself over to the hospital. Call me if you can get a photographer in for a shot. That gal’s a hero.”