Lost Girl Page 2

  Sandy liked our energy and our quickness. He shoveled facts into the vast open pit of our ignorance, and he punctured our pretensions. Reporting should be taken seriously, he said, but never too seriously. It was a job, maybe a trade or a craft, certainly not a profession. Reporting was a lot like life: “It’s important, and you try like hell to get it right, and tomorrow they’ll wrap fish with it. Then you do it again.” And he laughed at us when we had it coming. “You know that for a fact?” he would say quietly, and we would go red and silent, and he would chuckle. Once, unwarily, I told him I was an atheist. I knew I was in trouble as soon as I heard the chuckle.

  “You mean, there is no God?” he said. “You know that for a fact?”

  I tried for five minutes to bluster it out, but the effort was doomed. As Sandy dryly pointed out, it was at least as dogmatic to deny God as to assert Him, and I had to concede in the end that the only defensible position was skepticism. I was really an agnostic, Sandy told me, and that’s what I have called myself ever since.

  Sandy was a natural teacher, gifted with patience, an ironic relish for his craft and a rich store of miscellaneous facts. I don’t know whether journalism schools can teach what he did, but I can’t imagine a lecturer with his perfect pitch for timing a lesson and making it stick. I remember, for instance, that I always had trouble asking the obvious question. I wanted to seem knowing and wise and cynical, not naive and ignorant, and the result was that I tended to accept the premises of the person I was interviewing. Sandy said it was my business to be ignorant. That was what reporters did: they ran around asking the questions that everybody else would ask if only they had the license. If you knew all the answers without leaving the office, either you were some kind of prophet, or it wasn’t news. More likely, you were just one of those old tame beat reporters who see the world from their source’s point of view. It was never the city hall reporter who broke the big scandal in the mayor’s office, Sandy said; the guy who got the story would be some cub asking a dumb, naive question. And he drove the lesson home one evening when we were watching a televised press conference with the governor, who was declaring for a second term.

  “What was the best question?” Sandy asked at the end.

  “Why are you running again?” I said.

  “Right,” said Sandy. “That was Rita Covey from the Grand Rapids Press. She never runs with the pack. You noticed that all the beat men and the political reporters were asking technical questions - how are you going to carry Lapeer County, have you patched it up with the majority leader, what are you doing with the highway budget? At least half of that was meant to make themselves look smart and impress five other guys in the same room. Then Rita got down to basics, and the governor was flummoxed. He didn’t expect the question, and he blurted out the truth, and it will be everybody’s headline tomorrow.” Sure enough, they were all variations on the Eagle’s banner: ‘I HAVEN’T HAD ENOUGH,’ SAYS GOV.

  It is a lesson I am still learning, thirty years later. There are some obvious questions that have to be asked just from journalistic duty: “Your partner says you stole money; is it true?” “Sorry, I don’t know what that means. What does it mean?” If you don’t ask questions like that, your story is incomplete, and everybody can see it. But there is another kind of obvious question that often goes unasked, and nobody notices. Like Rita Covey’s, such questions mostly touch on emotions: Are you sorry you killed her? How did it feel to win? It takes longer to learn to ask those, and it never feels comfortable. You often get nothing but obvious answers, and then it feels exactly the way it looks on TV when some reporter asks a weeping mother how it felt to watch her daughter getting hit by a truck. You have to ask anyway. But a print reporter has one edge on the TV guys: If the answer is a dud, you don’t have to use it.

  One night, I handed Sandy a feature about a man who had left his city job and bought an old mill up in Oakland County, with a mill pond and a good deal of rustic charm and was now grinding flour for a living. The piece was adequate, maybe a little on the lush side, filled with details of the miller’s loving restoration of the old machinery, his dialogue with the farmers who brought him wheat, the quiet rhythm of the seasons, and the contrast with his old life as an auto engineer. But Sandy hung over it longer than usual.

  Finally, he asked me: “Does he like it?”

  “What do you mean?” I protested. “Of course, he likes it. It’s all through the piece, how he-”

  “Yes,” said Sandy. “Call him up and ask him if he likes it.”

  I felt balky and foolish, but I did that. The miller said, “Tell you the truth, I thought I’d love it, and it’s boring me out of my skull. I hate to say it, but this whole thing was a mistake. I just now got an offer to work on the racing circuit. If I can sell this place, I’m out of here like shit from a goose.”

  So, I rewrote the story, making the lead a classified ad for the mill and tempering the lushness with a twist of wry: a story of answered prayers. It was a good deal more interesting, and Sandy nodded. “You see,” he said. “The reason you ask the obvious question comes down to this: You never know what they’re going to say. And that’s why the job stays interesting, Billy.” He was right there, too. But how had he known? When I asked him, he said I was too good a writer. Even though I hadn’t seen it, I was conveying the miller’s unhappiness in the rhythms of his talk. That was a nice way of making me feel better, but I didn’t believe it then and I don’t now. If I had actually asked the man whether he liked it, before he got his job offer, he would probably have lied. Sandy had some kind of weird magic, an editor’s stomach that told him things.

  Now, at Sammy’s, Ed was telling about his evening at the Demetrios house. We all knew such scenes. No matter how they turned out, they were death watches: somebody missing, usually a child; the family worried sick, but playing to the audience, subtly corrupted by instant celebrity. There would be a cop or two there, noncommittal, and maybe a neighbor, and the reporters, scrambling for the facts and the photos, falsely reassuring. It was an easy photo grab, since the parents hoped a picture in the paper would help bring the missing child home, and the first reporter on scene would comb through the family album, raking off the good shots and trying to keep them from the competition. This time Ed got to the house first, and he snapped up the perfect photo: a shot of Molly, barefoot in a flowered dress, all by herself and looking lost and alone. It was a bit dated, maybe a year old, but it was just right for the story, and on page one of the Journal, it didn’t leave a dry eye in the city.

  Sometimes, at scenes like that, the family stayed behind closed doors, doing God knows what, but mostly the whole crew of press and police got into the house and sat around the kitchen or the living room. The mother would make coffee, sometimes even offer cookies around, trying to bury her agonies in the ceremony of hospitality. Brothers and sisters would be interviewed, veering from tongue-tied to self-important and back again. As the questions ran out and conversation grew strained, long silences would open out. Prodded by the reporters, the mother would go on and on about the missing child. After a while, she would start talking in the past tense, not even noticing.

  That was how this one went, Ed told us. The mother, Irene Demetrios, was thirty years old and not yet gone to fat, but distraught and fluttery. She was dark, he said, with a strong face, a wide mouth and high cheekbones. Molly was her first child, and Irene talked endlessly about her cheerfulness, her brightness, the time she left a playmate’s house where she had been visiting and found her way home alone, three whole blocks. Molly’s two-year-old brother, Nickie, toddled around for a while with a pacifier in his mouth until Irene stuck him in bed. The father, the accountant Nikos Demetrios, was six years older than his wife. He kept pacing around the living room, answering questions in monosyllables. From time to time he would retreat to a bedroom to use the telephone. “A nebbish,” Ed said in his slow, precise fashion. “He’s middle-sized and skinny, and he doesn’t look Greek at all. He has sort of mousy br
own hair, horn-rims and a funny-looking mustache, like it’s pasted on.”

  “Who does he work for?” Sandy asked.

  “Himself,” said Ed. “He has an office in the house, where the dining room was meant to be. He said he has individual clients and a few small businesses. I’d say he does all right; the house is kept well, and the furniture is a cut above Monkey Ward. But certainly, no big bucks.” From the beginning, there was never any thought that this might be a kidnapping for ransom. Molly had been playing in the back yard at 3:30, alone; she had answered when Irene called her at 3:45, but fifteen minutes later she wasn’t there. The neighbors hadn’t noticed anything unusual. A car that didn’t belong in the neighborhood had been parked across the street for a while, a dark blue or green ‘55 Ford, but there could be all sorts of explanations for that, and the police were working on it.

  I had written the main story, building in the dramatic highlights of the scene at the house: the mother’s collapse, the father’s vows of vengeance on the killer. But Ed’s sidebar on the vigil, with Steve as rewrite man, captured the flavor and atmosphere. Ed got all the facts in a row, as usual, when he called the story in, but I heard Steve pumping him for color: “What else? What do you see, what does it feel like? Dolls on the floor, anything like that?”

  Dolls on the floor weren’t what he wanted, of course. “Anything you can write without leaving the office is trite,” Sandy used to tell us. “I don’t need to hear any more hardened cops talking about the worst thing they’ve seen in forty years on the force. What I want, what lifts the story off the page, is the quote or the detail I can’t imagine in advance.”

  Finally, Steve got something he could use, and hung up. By the time Ed got back to the office, the story was done and edited. Ed grabbed a copy from the spike, then walked over and showed me the lead paragraph: “In the flickering blue light of a silent, unnoticed television set . . . “

  “The son of a bitch is a natural-born rewrite man,” said Ed, grinning.

  But now Ed was telling us what wasn’t in the story: a passage perhaps too revealing of our trade to be aired in a family newspaper. The search had been on for almost five hours, he said, and the sun was setting. Irene Demetrios seemed near collapse, and a neighbor was trying to persuade her to lie down for a while. Then Rodney Sharp, the oleaginous feature reporter for a local radio show, showed up late and walked her through the details again for his tape recorder. It was then, Ed said, that Mike Steele and the TV crew pulled up outside, arriving from the park. The sheriff apparently figured he had another shot at the evening news if he delivered the bad news himself and comforted the grieving parents.

  “But that prick Sharp,” Ed said, “that bastard. It had to be pure sadism. He saw Mike coming in, and he turned around and said, ‘By the way, the kid’s dead.’ Just like that, absolutely brutal. The mother dropped like a sack of flour. The father went for him, yelling and hitting, but sort of feebly, you know? And I grabbed Sharp by the back of the neck and shoved him out the door, the asshole. He still had his tape recorder going, so he could broadcast the reaction. What makes guys do things like that? It makes you feel dirty just to be there.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sandy. “I’ve known a lot of men like that, but I don’t know what makes them run. How did the father take it?”

  “Hard,” said Ed. “He was down on the floor beside his wife, sobbing and swearing, blaming himself somehow and yelling about the bastard who killed Molly. The odd thing, something I haven’t seen since combat in Korea: He shit his pants.”

  “That is odd,” said Sandy, considering it. “That’s something you associate with terror, not anger or grief. Well, who knows? Human emotions, you never know. People do anything. Keeps us in business.” He finished his beer and stood up to go. He was halfway down the bar when he wheeled around and said, abruptly: “Good work, you three.” We grinned at each other. Sandy was sparing with his compliments; when you got one, you deserved it.

  The evening shift was a great time for learning. The city was in high gear then, from politics and late-running civic meetings to society parties and the culture beat - music and theater, evening lectures at the local universities, visiting celebrities to be interviewed. We got to sample the whole menu, but the emphasis was on crime, mayhem, and disaster. The Journal was an afternoon paper, hitting the street at 9 a.m. with its first edition; there were new editions all day, ending at 5 o’clock, but the big one for home delivery went to bed around noon. There was rarely a day when the home edition didn’t have at least one front-page story from the evening shift. Some days we would provide nearly the whole front page, with jumps and sidebars inside. It made you wonder what everybody else on the paper was doing.

  The answer was, not much. Sometimes I’d come in early and see the cavernous city room, grimy and smelly and full of troops: three or four rewrite men, taking telephone notes from the beat reporters at City Hall or the cop shop; a dozen reporters pounding out stories or reading papers or working the phones or just talking; four or five copy editors sitting around the rim of the half-moon copy desk; two or three copy boys running errands around the room; and City Editor Phil Sanderson and his two assistants up on their platform, where they could survey the whole scene. There was paper everywhere, thumbtacked to the walls, heaped in precarious stacks on desks and wadded on the floor. There were cigarette butts, littered around or burning black scars into the tops of old wooden desks. And the jumpy little managing editor, Clarence Mannion, presided over the grubby circus from his corner office. Sandy said the room was always full because Clarence didn’t trust the reporters and got itchy if they were actually out on the street: he wanted to keep them in sight, so he’d know what they were doing. Besides, if a tornado hit, he wanted to be sure he had enough people to cover it. It was an odd paradox, all the reporters held hostage in the big city room, kept from their trade and ducking across the street for a drink out of sheer boredom. But that was the way it was. In the daytime at least, the Journal covered the city largely by remote control.

  Even if the coverage had been hands-on, the Journal probably couldn’t have told the truth about Detroit. It was a strange time, the end of an era, but that was a story nobody could see. The city was in the grip of converging forces we didn’t begin to understand. The auto business and Detroit were still synonymous, and the cars were getting longer and flashier every year; in 1957, they had begun growing the tailfins that came to symbolize Detroit even though they vanished in three short years. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler owned the city. None of the three daily papers would have dreamed of really covering the industry, warts and all, with a healthy adversarial relationship. The automotive editors were mostly amiable drunks, extensions of the Big Three public relations shops. They hailed the new models with evangelistic fervor and mourned strikes as tragedies. All the auto executives were geniuses and all the industry news was good. Ralph Nader was still in law school, so the safety problem didn’t exist, and automotive lemons were a fact of life, at least as unmentionable as rape. Footsteps were clumping toward us from Germany and Japan, but Detroit wasn’t listening. Foreign cars were so weird and rare in those parts in 1958, that I once located a college student, in a city of two million people, knowing only his name and the fact that he was driving a yellow Volkswagen. It took just two phone calls.

  The footsteps of the civil rights marchers could also be heard, all the way from Alabama, but they roused no echoes in the white bastions of Detroit. One night I covered a sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. The story I wrote was brief, respectful and without comprehension: I thought he was talking about injustice in the Jim Crow south. Several hundred weeping, exultant black people in the congregation knew better. Mostly, the newspapers ignored the black third of Detroit. The bigotry was automatic and cynical. I made the mistake once of phoning in a lurid murder from the police beat. The rewrite man was chortling at the details, but then I gave an address. “Oh, hell, a spade killing,” he said.
“Why are you wasting my time?” If it was black, it wasn’t news. That was the way it was, and I accepted the rules. But when black people did impinge on the white world, I sometimes had to chase a story into Paradise Valley, the blackest and shabbiest part of town. I would take one of the Journal’s cars and go alone, peering into the dark front porches along unlighted, unkempt streets, seeing mainly the white flashes of teeth and eyeballs. The people were unfailingly helpful; somehow, they didn’t hold the Journal’s sins against me. Just nine years later, the fury I didn’t see would erupt into the riots that buried the old Detroit forever.

  For now, though, the city sat there, bustling and complacent, on its bend in the river between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. It was semicircular on the map, with its principal streets like the spokes of a wagon wheel radiating from the old downtown riverfront, and it had overlapping concentric layers of factories and residential neighborhoods like tree rings recording spurts of growth. The mansions of the old aristocrats on the fringe of downtown, built in the prehistory before Ford’s assembly line, had decayed into boarding houses. The new rich lived beyond Six Mile Road now, on winding quiet streets in places called Palmer Woods or Sherwood Forest, out by the golf club. Or they had moved out to the tonier suburbs, Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills. There were Hungarian neighborhoods and black neighborhoods and German neighborhoods; there was a surprisingly large Lebanese community and a whole self-contained city, Hamtramck, an island surrounded by Detroit, inhabited mainly by Poles. There were slums, with rickety unpainted back porches two and three stories high, and near-slum houses with untended yards and asphalt siding made to resemble bricks. There were streets of sturdy brick two-family houses, the route to middle-class security for their owner-landlords, and one-family houses with garages and big front porches. And there were trees everywhere, even in the meanest slums: arching elms, broad maples, oaks and hickories, locusts and ailanthus.