Basket Case

"What's up?"she asks.

  "The Stomarti obit."

  Emma looks surprised. Even when riven with errors, obituaries rarely cause headaches for editors. Legally, it is impossible to libel a dead person.

  Hurriedly I tell Emma about Janet Thrush's phone call and the visit to the funeral home and the absence of autopsy stitches in Jimmy Stoma's corpse. Emma listens with an annoying trace of restlessness. At any moment I expect my buddy Juan to come sauntering out the door, zipping up his pants.

  When I'm done with my pitch, Emma purses her lips and says, "You think we should run a correction?"

  Christ, she's serious. I bite back the impulse to ridicule. Instead I lower my eyes and find myself gazing at Emma's bare feet, which I've never seen before. Her toenails are painted in alternating colors of cherry red and tangerine, which seems drastically out of character.

  "Jack?"

  "There's nothing to correct," I explain evenly. "The story wasn't wrong; it just wasn't all there."

  "What do you think happened to the guy?"

  "I think I'd like to see a coroner's report from the Bahamas."

  "How would we handle that?" Emma is beginning to fidget. She glances over her shoulder but still hasn't acknowledged Juan's presence inside the apartment.

  "We would handle that," I say, "by me flying to Nassau and interviewing the doctor who examined Jimmy Stoma's body."

  Emma looks exasperated, as if I'm the one who is confused. Turns out I am.

  She says, "No, what I meant was—Jack, you can't do it. You've got to finish Old Man Polk right away. They say he's fading fast... "

  "What?"

  MacArthur Polk once owned the Union-Register. If the clippings are accurate, he has been dying off and on for seventeen years. I am the latest reporter assigned to pre-write an obituary.

  "Emma, are you serious?" My disgust is genuine; the incredulity, feigned.

  She removes a green silk scarf from her back pocket and nervously begins twisting it like an eel around one of her slender wrists.

  "Listen, Jack, if you really think there's something there—"

  "I do. I know there's something there."

  "Okay, then, tomorrow you get all your notes together and we'll go see Rhineman. Maybe he's got somebody he can pull free to make some phone calls."

  Rhineman is the Metro editor, the hard-news guy. My stomach knots up.

  "Emma, I can make the calls. I'm perfectly capable of working the phones."

  Stiffly she edges back toward the apartment. "Jack," she says, "we don't do foul play. We don't do murder investigations. We do obituaries."

  "Please. A couple days is all I'm asking."

  I can't believe I actually said please.

  The retreat continues, Emma shaking her head. "I'm sorry—let's talk at the office, okay? First thing in the morning." She reaches the door and disappears as lithely as a ferret down a hole.

  I sit in her driveway for several minutes, letting the rage burn out. Eventually, the urge to grab a tire iron and mess up her new champagne-colored Camry passes. Why am I surprised by what happened here? What the hell was I thinking?

  Driving home, I turn up the bass for the Slut Puppies. I find myself entertaining a ribald image of Juan Rodriguez trussed with silk scarves to the bedposts while being straddled boisterously by Emma.

  Emma, with her goddamn two-tone jellybean toenails.

  I live alone in a decent fourth-floor apartment not far from the beach. Three different women have lived here with me, Anne being the most recent and by far the most patient. A snapshot of her in a yellow tank suit remains attached by a magnet to the refrigerator door. Inside the refrigerator is half a bucket of chicken wings, a six-pack of beer and a triangular slab of molding cheddar. Tonight the beer is all that interests me, and I'm on my third when somebody knocks.

  "Yo, Obituary Boy? You home?"

  When Juan opens the door, I salute from the couch. He grabs a beer for himself and sits down in one of the matching faded armchairs. "The Marlins are playing," he says.

  "That's a matter of opinion."

  "Where's the TV?" Juan motions to the vacant space in the center of the wall unit. "Don't tell me you launched it off the balcony again."

  That sometimes happens when I try to watch music videos. "It's pathetic," I say to my friend. "I'm not proud of myself."

  "Who was it this time?"

  "One of those 'boy bands.' I don't remember which." I roll the cool sweaty bottle across my forehead.

  Juan looks a little uptight.

  "You're how old now—thirty-four?" I ask.

  "Not tonight, Jack."

  "You should be on top of the world, man. You've already hung in there longer than Keith Moon or John Belushi." I can't help myself.

  Juan says, "Why do you do this?"

  I put a Stones record on the stereo because you can't go wrong with the Stones. Juan knows most of the songs, even the early stuff—he has fully acculturated himself since arriving in the 1981 exodus from the port of Mariel, Cuba. He was sixteen at the time, four years older than the sister who accompanied him on an old Key West lobster boat. They were with a group of thirty-seven refugees, among whom were a handful of vicious criminals that Castro yanked out of prison and shipped to Miami as a practical joke. Everyone at the paper knows Juan came over on the boatlift. What they don't know is what happened forty miles at sea in the black of night—Juan told me the story after too many martinis. One of the convicts decided to have some fun with Juan's sister and one of the others offered to stand watch, and neither of them paid enough attention to the girl's skinny brother, who somehow got his hands on a five-inch screwdriver. Many hours later, when the lobster boat docked at Key West, the immigration officer counted only thirty-five passengers, including Juan and his sister in a ripped dress. The others said nothing about what had taken place on the voyage.

  Juan takes a slug of beer and says to me: "Good piece today."

  "Come on, man."

  "What?"

  "It's a goddamn obit."

  "Hey, it was interesting. I remember hearing the Slut Puppies on the radio," he says. " 'Trouser Troll' was kinda catchy."

  "I thought so, too." I'm eager to tell Juan about the Jimmy Stoma mystery, but I'm wondering if he already knows. If he does, it means he and Emma are tighter than I thought.

  "Did she tell you?" I ask.

  "Who? Oh—Emma?"

  "No, Madeleine fucking Albright." I set my empty bottle on the floor. "Look, I hope I didn't interrupt anything this afternoon. Normally, I'd never—"

  "You didn't." Juan grins. "I was helping with her computer. She got a new browser."

  "I'll bet she did."

  "Honest. That's all."

  "Then why didn't you pop out and say hi?"

  Juan says, "She asked me not to."

  That's just like Emma, worrying that Juan's presence as my friend and her potential sex partner would somehow undermine her primacy in the editor-reporter relationship.

  "Hell," I say, "I thought she had you lashed to the bed."

  "I wish." Juan, smiling again. Sometimes he's too charming for his own good.

  "Did she tell you or not?"

  "Why you stopped by? Sure, she told me."

  "And did she tell you what she said?"

  Juan nods sympathetically. "It really blows."

  "That's why I'm drinking."

  "Three beers is not drinking, Jack." He has counted the bottles on the floor. "Three beers is sulking."

  "What should I do about Emma?" I rise out of a slouch. "Wait—why the hell'm I asking you?"

  "Because I'm wise beyond my years?"

  "Do me a favor," I say. "If you're screwing her, please don't tell me. Just change the subject and I'll get the message."

  "Deal," says Juan with a decisive nod. "Hey, there's a rumor Marino's coming out of retirement!"

  "Very smooth, asshole."

  "Jack, I'm not sleeping with Emma."

  "Excellent," I say, "then you're
free to advise me. This woman intends to dump Jimmy Stoma on the Metro desk. My story, Juan, and this cold-blooded wench wants to give it away!"

  "And I thought the Sports desk was a pit."

  I hear myself asking, "What can you possibly see in her?"

  Juan hesitates. I know he's at no loss for words because he is a fine writer, much better than I am, even in his second language.

  "Emma's different than the others, Jack."

  "So is a two-headed scorpion."

  "You want, I'll talk to her."

  "No!"

  "Just trying to help."

  "You don't understand," I say. "There's a complicated dynamic between Emma and me."

  Juan's right foot is tapping to the music; Jagger, singing of street-fighting men.

  "It's my story," I grumble, "and she won't let me do it."

  "I'm sorry, man." Juan knows what happened to me, the whole odious business. He knows where I stand at the newspaper. He calls me "Obituary Boy" to keep things light, but he truly feels lousy about the situation. It can't be helped. He's a star and I'm a lump of jackal shit.

  "Quit," he says earnestly.

  "That's the best you can do?"

  Juan has been advising me to resign ever since my demotion to the Death page. "That's exactly what Emma wants—didn't she tell you? It's what they all want. So I'm not quitting, Juan, until the day they beg me to stay."

  He's not up for one of my legendary rants. I can't imagine why. "Tell me about Jimmy Stoma," he says.

  So I tell him everything I know.

  "Okay," he says after a moment's thought, "let's say there was no autopsy. What does that really prove? It's the Bahamas, Jack. I'm guessing they know a drowned scuba diver when they see one."

  "But what if—"

  "Anyway, who'd want to kill a has-been rock star?" Juan asks, not cruelly.

  "Maybe nobody," I admit, "but I won't know for sure unless Emma cuts me free for a few days."

  Juan sits forward and rubs his chin. I trust his judgment. He would have made a terrific news reporter if he didn't love baseball so much.

  "I've got something to show you," he says, bouncing to his feet, "but I left it in the car."

  He's out the door and back in two minutes. He hands me a printout of the Jimmy Stoma obituary that will run in tomorrow's New York Times. The header says: James Stomarti, 39, Rambunctious Rock Performer.

  Although the story isn't half as long as mine, I refuse to read it. The Times has the most elegant obituary writing in the world, and I'm in no mood to be humbled.

  "Look at the damn story," Juan insists.

  "Later."

  "Yours was better."

  "Yeah, right."

  "Pitiful," Juan says. "You're a child."

  I peek at the first paragraph:

  James Bradley Stomarti, once the hell-raising front man for the 1980s rock group Jimmy and the Slut Puppies, died last week on a laid-back boating excursion in the Bahamas.

  I mutter to Juan, "The lead's not bad."

  "Check out what Pop-Singer Wifey has to say. Check out the premonition," he says, pointing.

  "What premonition?"

  Six paragraphs into the obit, there it is:

  Mr. Stomarti's wife, the singer Cleo Rio, said she had been apprehensive about her husband's plan to explore the sunken plane wreck, even though he was an experienced diver.

  "I had a wicked bad vibe about that dive," Ms. Rio said. "I begged Jimmy not to go. He'd been down sick with food poisoning from some bad fish chowder. He was in so much pain he could hardly put his tank on. God, I wish I could've stopped him."

  I can't believe what I'm reading.

  Juan says, "I'm guessing the lovely Ms. Rio didn't tell you the same story. You wouldn't have passed up a chance to work the phrase 'bad fish chowder' into an obituary."

  "Or even 'wicked bad vibe,'" I say, indignantly waving the pages. "The girl never said anything about this. She said she was lounging around the boat, reading a magazine and working on her tan. Didn't sound the least bit worried about her old man diving a plane wreck."

  "Something's screwy," Juan agrees.

  "Any brilliant ideas?"

  "You've already made up your mind, no?"

  My eyes are drawn again to the Times obit. I am relieved to see that the reporter had no more luck than I did in locating the Bahamian coroner. Also missing: any mention of Cleo Rio's Shipwrecked Heart project. Boy, will she be pissed.

  "Jack, what are you going to do?" Juan presses.

  "The story, of course. It's mine and I'm writing it."

  "How? Emma won't back down... "

  He's right. She won't back down, she'll crumble. That's the plan. Juan looks worried, but I can't say whether it's for me or for her. Maybe both.

  "What're you going to do?" he asks again.

  "Well, tomorrow I plan to call in sick," I say.

  "Ugh-oh."

  "So I can attend a funeral."

  "I fucking knew it."

  "You're smiling again, you dog."

  "Yeah," Juan says. "I guess I am."

  7

  Sure, it would be a kick to write for one of those big serious dailies in Miami, St. Petersburg, or even (in my dreams) Washington or New York. But that's not in the cards. This is my fifth newspaper job and surely the last. I am increasingly unfit for the trade.

  The Union-Register was founded in 1931 by MacArthur Polk's father, who upon retirement passed it to his only son, who kept it both solvent and respectable until three years ago, when he unexpectedly sold out to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for $47 million in cash, stock and options. It was the foulest day in the newspaper's history.

  Maggad-Feist is a publicly traded company that owns twenty-seven dailies around the country. The chairman and CEO, young Race Maggad III, believes newspapers can prosper handsomely without practicing distinguished journalism, as distinguished journalism tends to cost money. Race Maggad III believes the easiest way to boost a newspaper's profits is to cut back on the actual gathering of news. For obvious reasons, he was not a beloved figure at any of the twenty-six other papers owned by Maggad-Feist. He would not be beloved at ours, either, although only one reporter would dare stand up and say so to his face—at a shareholders' meeting, no less, with a stringer for the Wall Street Journal in the audience. The remarks were brief but shockingly coarse, causing young polo-playing Race Maggad III to lose his composure in front of five hundred edgy investors. For his effrontery the reporter could not be fired (or so the paper's attorneys advised). He could, however, be removed from the prestigious investigations team and exiled to the obituary beat, with the expectation he would resign in bitter humiliation.

  He did not.

  Consequently, he's now saddled with the task of memorializing the very sonofabitch who brought this plague upon the house. MacArthur Polk is rumored to be dying again.

  I keep a file of obituaries of prominent persons who are still alive. When one of them dies, the "canned" obit is topped with a few new paragraphs and rushed into print. Usually I update a pre-written obituary when the subject is reported as "ailing," the standard newspaper euphemism for "at death's door."

  MacArthur Polk has been ailing since 1983, which is one reason I haven't bothered doing a canned obit. The old bastard isn't really dying; he just enjoys the fuss made over him at hospitals. For about the eleventh time he has been admitted to the ICU at Charity, so Emma is jumpy. Although Polk no longer owns the Union-Register, he is a community icon and, more significantly, a major shareholder of Maggad-Feist. When his obituary finally appears, it will be read intently by persons high up the management ladder, persons who might hold sway over Emma's future. Consequently, she feels she has a stake in the old man's send-off. She wants it to be sparkling and moving and unforgettable. She wants a masterpiece, and she wants me to write it.

  So I've deliberately shown no interest whatsoever. My own stake in MacArthur Polk's death is nada. I could sit down with a stack of clippings and in an h
our knock off an obit that was humorous, colorful, poignant—a gem in every way. And it would be filed in the computer until the day the old man finally croaked, when it would be electronically shipped to another reporter for freshening. The story would appear under his or her byline on the front page. At the very end, in parenthesized italics, I might or might not be given credit for "contributing" to the research.