Lost Girl Read online

  The little girl’s body nestled in the high grass the way some children sleep, rear end aimed skyward and knees tucked under and head twisted to one side. One arm was flung out and the hand turned surprisingly palm up, with the fingers curved a little. There was blood under the fingernails. Her buttocks were pink in the late evening sun, and the blood at the back of her head was caked dry and brown, inconspicuous in the dirty blonde tangle of hair. She had on a white blouse, pulled up around her armpits, and one red canvas sneaker. Her name was Molly. She had been four years old.

  She lay in a rough circle roped off by the sheriff’s deputies to keep the crowd away. There were maybe fifty of us there, reporters, neighbors, passers-by and various officials, mopping sweat in the stale summer heat, talking in low voices and staring at the quiet body. Two detectives were walking gingerly inside the circle of rope thrown over wooden sawhorses, inspecting the ground; they looked oddly furtive, embarrassed. I was wishing somebody would keep the flies off her.

  “The parents been told?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Billy,” said Don Forster. He was a detective, rumpled and sweat-stained in his old sport jacket and cheap necktie, a little bulgy at the waistline and thinning on top. Smart, low-key, calm. A decent guy.

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “Sheriff said don’t move her until he gets here.”

  Right, him and the TV crews. All this was back in 1958, in that dawn of civilization when television was still black and white for most people, but the politicians had even then learned to play to the cameras. With an election less than four months away, Wayne County Sheriff Mike Steele wasn’t going to miss his shot at the evening news, not just to make life easier for his deputies or the girl’s parents or newspaper stiffs like me.

  Mike was lucky to be in on the case at all. By a sort of geographical accident, the park where the body was found was in county territory, a narrow twisting strip along the Rouge River dividing the western edge of Detroit from the suburb of Dearborn. Back when the lines were being drawn, neither city wanted to bother with a worthless flood plain, so they left it for the county and somebody called it a park. But nobody bothered to maintain it with more than a lick and a promise; it was overgrown and littered with junk - cans and bottles, an old bedspring, the back seat of a car.

  I was jumpy and excited. This was a big story, and I was still a new guy - only six months on the Detroit Journal after two years on the Wyandotte Gazette - trying to prove I could keep up with anybody in big-city reporting. The Journal was an afternoon paper, so we had all night until the first edition went to press; I was trying to figure out where the story would go, how I might get some exclusive angle, and how to keep it away from the competition until the Journal was safely on the street. I was also trying to keep my cool, thinking of Molly as “the kid,” her body as an object, the whole event as a kind of test I had to pass. I saw myself as a critic, a professional watcher, licensed to represent the vast prurient public. But there was another watcher inside my skull, keeping up a running commentary on my performance, mostly disapproving. I tried to deflect his sneers with borrowed lines, knowing and sardonic: I am a camera. I might be young and green, but it didn’t have to show. Of course, it showed.

  Two of the old hands from the rival papers were there now, talking to the coroner, cleaning up details I already had in my notebook. I hung within earshot, envying their assurance and worrying that they might learn something I had missed. They were brisk and efficient in contrasting styles, Bob Kelly of the Eagle all synthetic Irish charm, Al Greenberg from the Courier weary, morose and cynical.

  “What killed her, Doc?” said Kelly.

  “She was hit on the back of the head,” said the coroner, short, tired and not very interested. “More than once, probably. Could be a rock.”

  “She die right away?”

  “I can’t say. Been dead maybe an hour, maybe two.”

  “Raped?”

  “No, no penetration anyway.”

  “Does that mean the guy came against her?” said Greenberg.

  “There’s something that looks like dried semen on the legs, yes.”

  “He did it right out in the open, in broad daylight?” said Kelly.

  “Probably not,” said the coroner. “Looks like she was dragged out of that patch of woods over there. Or crawled, maybe.” Her little blue shorts had been found in there, he said, and the other sneaker. No sign of any underpants.

  “How do you spell your name, Doc?”

  Schultz the snapper wandered up with his dangling, thumping photographer’s bag and his big Speed Graphic camera, bored and cranky as always when he had to do any work. He was old and fat and not very competent, with a thick German accent and thinly veiled contempt for the young reporters who theoretically told him what pictures to take and guarded his back in tight spots. “I’m going back,” he announced.

  “You got everything here?” I said. “Okay, stop off at the house. Get the parents and the scene there, a couple of interiors if they’ll let you in. Check with Ed and see if he’s got anything more to be carried to the office, okay?”

  As usual, Schultz couldn’t have cared less how big the story was, and he didn’t want to stop at the house. “I got to get back and soup this stuff,” he said.

  “Listen, Schultz, there’s eight hours before deadline. Stop at the house, okay?” He walked off without saying anything, not giving me the satisfaction, but I figured he’d do it.

  The dead girl’s house, less than a mile away, was well within the Detroit city limits. Ed Grabo, on stakeout there with her parents, had been on the story from the start, when Molly was just a missing kid and the small headline in the Journal’s final edition ran on an inside page: SEEK LOST GIRL, 4. When the police organized a real search, sweeping through back yards and alleys in the neighborhood, the city desk sent me out, a twenty-minute drive on the new freeway from the office downtown, to cover it. I had passed the house on my way; it was a neat brick ranch, perched on a slope above street level, with its garage tucked into the basement and a wrought iron railing down the steps from the front door. It looked solidly middle-class, a cut above most of the victims’ houses I had seen in three years of reporting. Word from the police beat was that the girl’s father was some sort of accountant. So, the story, already big, would have more grab than the same set of facts in a slum or a factory neighborhood. All three Detroit papers and the suburban competition had reporters on the scene, and the TV crew would be along any minute.

  Flies buzzed, the sun sank another inch or so and we all kept sweating. Finally, a station wagon lurched through the high grass of the park, lettered on each side WDTR-TV Channel 3, loaded to the axles with television cameras and batteries and sound equipment and tripods and cable. All of us from the papers watched, envious and scornful, while the crew set up the shoot and the sheriff conferred importantly with his detectives, obviously waiting to be summoned. In those days, the print reporters still despised the TV men as glamorous phonies, empty handsome faces who depended on us to do all the work. They couldn’t even ask their own questions, but somehow had the politicians by the balls and fooled the public into thinking they were newsmen. They were always late on the scene, but they always beat us with the story. There was a lesson there we did not want to learn.

  “No cars allowed in here, they said,” Greenberg grumbled sarcastically.

  “We have to walk a quarter of a mile in and a quarter of a mile out every time we have to use a goddam telephone,” I said. It was a ritual of complaint; only the details changed.

  “Yeah,” said Kelly. “But then, we have sense enough to know what Mike Steele’s quotes are worth, which is about one line in the sixth paragraph. The wave of the future over there will let him blather on for five mi
nutes, six different ways to say nothin’. Billy, you’re supposed to be a smart kid; why aren’t you over there, jerkin’ off the microphone? Don’t you know the future when it bites you in the ass?”

  “I like it here,” I said.

  “Glory, there’s hope for journalism,” said Kelly, sarcastic. I felt my face go red. Oh, nice line, sneered the critic in my head. Now what? Too late, I thought of the right reaction: a punch on the biceps or a feinted knee to the groin. I had never been very comfortable in the high school locker room, and now it looked as if I was making a career there.

  Steele had a solid grip on the mike. He was short for a cop, plump and self-important and faintly ridiculous, but his picture always looked authentic enough on the re-election posters, with the little eyes hard and the brush cut bristling. He could have been born to run for sheriff, with the perfect name thrown in: who wouldn’t vote for a Mike Steele? Now the camera and the clichés rolled together: he would leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of this horrible crime; an all-out search would be made to find and apprehend the animal who had done this; his heart went out to the parents of this poor beautiful child; the whole county was shocked and dismayed; even now his detectives were sifting the clues. After a while they shut off the camera, so he stopped talking and handed the mike reluctantly to deputy Melvin Flupp, who had found the body.

  “Take the mike and stand in there,” the cameraman told Flupp. “Just start telling me how you found her, and when I wave, keep talking and start walking slowly toward me, get it?”

  “I don’t know you should do that,” the sheriff said, alarmed. “Nobody supposed to go in there.” This was obviously the live shot; he could see himself reduced to a brief clip or forgotten on the cutting room floor.

  “That’s okay, Sheriff,” said the cameraman, with easy authority. “Go ahead, Flupp.”

  So Flupp stood beside the body, which was draped now with a blanket since you weren’t supposed to show bodies on television, let alone half-naked kids’ bodies. Then he waddled out slowly, simpering into the microphone in the dead officialese of police reports: “I was proceeding along Goochebee Road in car seven-nine when I perceived something that appeared to be a human body at a distance in the park, so I halted my vehicle and . . .”

  After the coroner’s men had taken the body away, still under the blanket but laid out flat on a stretcher with the arms tucked neatly in, the deputies took down the ropes and sawhorses and I walked over to the place where Molly had died. There was a small wet stain on the ground, and the grass was beginning to stand up again where her head had matted it down. Her cheek must be all printed, I thought, and suddenly, with no warning, my eyes were full. I walked back to the car and went off to find a phone.

  That was the beginning.

  “It’s crazy,” said Steve.

  “Of course, it’s crazy,” Sandy said amiably, taking a swallow of beer.

  “Here we are writing the big story of the day, right?” demanded Steve. “It’s page one, could be the banner headline. It’s a big story because a kid has been killed by a sex maniac. But we can’t say raped? We have to say she was murdered, and the police are trying to find out whether she was ‘criminally assaulted’? Makes the cops sound even dumber than they are.”

  “That’s the way we do it,” said Sandy. “Sure, it’s ridiculous. You could take up the law, I guess, if you like logic. Though I understand there may be some small inconsistencies there, too.”

  The shift had wound to an end, with the Molly story locked up, and we were having a late supper at Sammy Gold’s bar on Lafayette Avenue. It was our regular place, a newspaper bar where the Journal crowd hung out; Sammy kept it more or less clean, and the kitchen was competent with simple stuff. We had all been too busy to eat before then: me at the scene, then coming in to write the running story of the abduction and murder; Ed on stakeout with the family; Steve doing rewrite for Ed on the family sidebar and handling all the routine stuff; and Sandy holding it all together. Finally, at one o’clock in the morning, we were done, and the two-man midnight shift had taken over. I had finished my omelet and ordered another beer, and I was dunking fries in ketchup, one by one, as we hashed over the story.

  We were learning our craft that summer, three young guys breaking in on the old Journal, working for little Sandy Bell on the evening shift. Sandy’s crew, they called us. None of the old hands wanted to work from five o’clock to midnight, for obvious reasons, so the shift was left to the new hires. But a lot of interesting things happened in the evenings, from crimes and big fires to politics and industrial accidents, and there were days when the first edition of the paper would have our bylines all over the front page. And that summer of 1958, Sandy and his crew found a real story. It came in bits and pieces, a mosaic made of a long summer’s news, beginning with Molly’s murder. Each of us came up with fragments of the story, and Sandy finally put it together. We even printed it, part of it at least, and it changed the city and reverberated around the country. Now most of the players are dead, and I’m older than Sandy was then, and I can tell the rest of it.

  Some things Sandy just pounded into us: Get the story; always ask the next question; forget fancy writing; make your deadline. Some things we seemed to pick up from the city room air, thick with dust and cigarette smoke: the kinds of stories there were, and the jargon that went with each one; the prissy prurience of journalism in the late fifties; the blatant racism that nearly everybody took for granted. And some things Sandy let us find out for ourselves, underlining the lesson later on: that cynicism is a sin, for instance, and that it’s possible to be a newspaperman without being a son of a bitch. He had a credo over his desk, a tattered yellow piece of newsprint inscribed in eighteen-point type with the words of the great city editor, Stanley Walker: “Clean copy. Hard work. Better to know the truth than not.” ‘Twas not so wide as a wall nor so deep as a well, Sandy told us, but ‘twas enough, ‘twould serve. And it has.

  Sandy was short, lean, soft-spoken, and unobtrusive, with a quiet wit and a slow, amused smile. It has taken me years to understand how remarkable he really was. He was in his fifties then, a remote and incomprehensible age to a twenty-four-year-old, but even I could tell that Sandy wasn’t like most men his age. He was going to end his career as an assistant city editor on a provincial paper, an aging bachelor with no money to speak of and no name to survive his passing. There was a big hole somewhere in his life. But Sandy’s gray eyes behind their steel-rimmed glasses showed none of the baffled resentment, defeat, or despair I saw in the other men of his generation who hung around the city room and the gin mills. He wasn’t what you could call contented, ever, and he could be testy, especially with fools. But he was a cheerful man, canny, and a good friend. He was an optimist without illusions: he saw people whole, for what they were. In the end I disappointed him, moving on from Detroit, writing too few letters, letting our friendship wither and dry away. I know he was let down, sad, and a little angry, but I don’t think he was surprised. He knew me.

  He came from northern Michigan, a bleak lumbered-out small town where his father had been a storekeeper. Sandy got a couple of years of college before the Depression forced him to drop out and go to work, and he fell into journalism because they would pay him to write. He hired on at the Journal and learned his trade. He rode with federal agents chasing bootleggers across the Detroit River, he chronicled the hard times and the labor wars of the ‘30s and he covered the city’s crimes, courts, politics, and byways. He made friends all over the city, from Chinatown to the symphony hall. Early in World War II, nearly every morning there would be three or four Chinese boys waiting in the lobby for Sandy to come in: he was the only person their parents would trust to fill out their draft papers. Sandy himself wound up the war in Naval Intelligence, and long afterward he was still involved in spooky business. He would vanish for two or three weeks at a time, taking overseas trips that weren’t vacations, and he wouldn’t talk about them when he got back. These days, of cou
rse, no journalist would double as a spy, for all kinds of good reasons, but the rules hadn’t been written then. Sandy drew his own lines and stayed clean his own way.

  Sandy had a curious mind. He was a Civil War buff who could talk for hours about battles, generals, and troop movements. He could recite whole scenes from Shakespeare, and he once wrote for me, from memory, a list of all the kings and queens of England since William the Conqueror, with their dates and a witty line characterizing each reign. He was an amateur naturalist, concentrating on plants and birds, and he loved the theater and classical music. He said the acoustics in the Hill Auditorium at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor just might be the best in the country, and it was when he took me there that I first really heard Mozart. He wrote wonderfully funny letters. Sandy was a quiet man, a little shy, and I never knew what he did for sex. In those days a man could be a life-long bachelor without being automatically considered homosexual, and if he was, he never showed it. He lived alone, in an apartment with a lot of books and a good sound system, and he seemed content. He told me once that you never get any more out of your life than you put into it, and you can put just as much into farming or running a drugstore as you can into being a senator or a big-shot star of stage and screen. At the time, I doubted that.

  But he put a lot into us: Billy Morgan, who was me, and Steve Cooper, and Ed Grabo. We were a mixed lot. Journalism was making its big changeover in those days, from what had been a bunch of fairly raffish working stiffs to something that yearned to call itself a profession. All of us had been to college, which was a change in itself from Sandy’s generation, and we had been taught to take reporting seriously. We thought of ourselves as the fourth estate, part of the democratic process, keeping citizens alert and informed. We were supposed to function like priests, never taking sides, always apart from the story. We believed that the truth will make you free, and we had no doubt that truth was there to be found, all bright and sharp-edged, and unambiguous. We were also in favor of underdogs; with Mr. Dooley, we held that a good newspaper should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Of course, like Hemingway bullfighters, we weren’t supposed to talk about such sacred things. Our style was breezy and knowing, a wise-ass cynicism modeled on the Chicago pressrooms of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. We knew we didn’t know everything, and all of us were trying desperately to learn the tricks of reporting. But if we had known half as much as we thought we did, the three of us might have made one smart man.