LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 3

      The brief vacation from work seemed vaguely unreal to Kate once she was back at her desk at the Chicago daily newspaper where she worked. And, as usual, everything was in a virtual frenzy of confusion.

      Dan Harvey, the city editor, was the only man functioning at full capacity. There was an unwritten law somewhere that city editors didn’t fall victim to insanity. Kate often wondered if that was because they caused it.

      Harvey presided over the newsroom, and he managed story assignments as if it were delicate choreography. In the hierarchy of the newsroom, there was a state news editor who dealt with breaking stories outside the city and worked with the few stringers, or correspondents, the paper maintained outside the city proper. There was a feature editor, a wire services editor, a society editor, just to name a few, with all of them—Harvey included—under the watchful eye of the managing editor, Morgan Winthrop. Winthrop was a veteran reporter himself, who’d worked his way up the ranks to his present position. Next to the editor in chief, James Harris, and the publisher, Winthrop was top man in the paper’s power structure.

      At the moment, Kate was under Harvey’s gimlet eye while she finished the last, grueling paragraph in a rapidly unfolding political story about a local alderman who’d skyrocketed to fame by spending a week in a local neighborhood besieged by crime.

      It was just hard to think with a tall, bald man standing over her, glancing pointedly at his watch and tapping his foot. She hoped he’d get bunions, but he probably caused those, too.

      “Okay.” She breathed a sigh of relief and showed him the screen on the terminal.

      “Scroll it,” he instructed, and began to read the monitor from his vantage point above her left shoulder as she started the scrolling command. Since the word processor screen would only show a portion of the whole story, this command was used to move each line up so that another appeared at the bottom until the end. Harvey pursed his lips, mumbled something, nodded, mumbled something else.

      “Okay, do it,” he said tersely and left her sitting there without a tiny word of praise.

      “Thanks, Kate, you did a great job,” she told herself as she entered the story into the memory of the computer. “You’re a terrific reporter, we love you here, we’d never let you go even if it meant giving you a ten-thousand-dollar raise.”

      “Kate’s getting a ten-thousand-dollar raise,” Dorie Blake yelled across the bustling city room to Harvey. “Can I have one, too?”

      “Society editors don’t get raises,” he returned with dry humor, and didn’t even look over his shoulder. “You get paid off by attending weddings.”

      “What?” Dorie shot back.

      “Wedding cake. Punch. Hors d’oeuvres. You get fed as a fringe benefit.”

      Dorie stuck out her tongue.

      “Juvenile, juvenile,” Harvey murmured, and went into his office and closed the door.

      “Tell Mr. Winthrop that Harvey goosed you behind the copy machine,” Bud Schuman suggested on his way to the water fountain, his head as bald as Harvey’s, his posture slightly stooped, his glasses taped at one ear.

      Dorie glared at him. “Bud, they took out the Linotype machine ten years ago. And our managing editor doesn’t listen to sob stories. He’s too busy trying to make sure the paper shows a profit.”

      “Did they take out the copy machine?” he asked vaguely. “No wonder I don’t have anyplace to leave my files…”

      “Honest to God, one day he’ll lose his car just by not noticing where he parked it.” The older woman shook her red head.

      “He’s still the best police reporter we have,” Kate reminded her. “Twenty-five years at it. Why, he took me to lunch one day and told me about a white-slavery racket that the police broke up here. They were actually selling girls—”

      “I should be lucky enough to be sold to Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Dorie sighed, smiling dreamily.

      “With your luck, they’d sell you to a restaurant, where you’d spend your twilight years washing plates that had contained barbecued ribs,” Bud murmured as he walked back past them.

      “Sadist!” Dorie wailed.

      “I’ve got three committee meetings, and then I have a news conference downtown.” Kate shook her head, searching for her camera. “Alderman James is at it again.” She grinned. “He’s just finished his week in the combat zone and is going to tell us all how to solve the problem. With any luck, I’ll get the story and have it phoned in to rewrite in time to eat supper at a respectable hour.”

      “Do you think he’s really got answers, or is he just doing some politicking under the watchful eye of the press?” Dorie asked.

      Kate pursed her lips. “I think he cares. He dragged me out of a meeting at city hall and enlisted me to help a black family in that ward when their checks ran out. You remember, I did a story on them—it was a simple computer error, but they were in desperate straits and sick…”

      “I remember, all right.” Dorie smiled at her. “You’re the only person I know who could walk down back alleys at night in that neighborhood without being bothered. The residents would kill anybody who touched you.”

      “That’s why I love reporting,” Kate said quietly. “We can do a lot of harm, or we can do a lot of good.” She winked. “I’d rather help feed the hungry than grandstand for a reputation. See you.” She slung the shoulder strap of the camera over her shoulder, hitched up her little laptop computer in its plastic carrying case, and started off. She could use the computer for the committee meetings and even the alderman’s breaking story. She had a modem at home, so when she fed the notes into it, she could just patch them into the newspaper from the comfort of her living room. It certainly did beat having to find a phone and pant bare facts to someone on the rewrite desk.

      Unfortunately for Kate, the little computer broke down at the last committee meeting, just before she was to cover the alderman’s speech. She cursed modern science until she ran out of breath as she crawled through rush-hour traffic toward city hall. There was no time to go by the paper and get a spare computer; she’d just have to take notes by hand. Great, she muttered, remembering that she didn’t have a spare scrap of paper in her purse or one stubby pencil!

      She found some old bank envelopes under the car seat while she was stuck in traffic and folded them, stuffing them into the jacket of her safari pantsuit. It was chic but comfortable, and set off her nice tan. With it, she was wearing sneakers that helped her move quickly on crowded streets. She’d learned a long time ago that reporting was easier on the feet when they had a little cushioning underneath.

      As she drove her small Volkswagen down back streets to city hall, she wondered if Jacob had been in town and had tried to get her but failed, since she’d been working late. She’d been so excited about that remark he’d made that she’d been crazy enough to invest in a telephone answering machine, but she knew many people would hang up rather than leave a message. She spent her free time sitting next to the telephone, staring out the window at the street below. And when she wasn’t doing that, she haunted her mailbox for letters with a South Dakota

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