The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Read online

  “Maybe so,” Mike said. “But, like I say, it’s up to the public information officer to set up.”

  “Good enough.”

  I was glad Arnie hadn’t pushed Mike any harder with his interview request. Mike’s probably the only publicity-shy policeman in the United States. Maybe the world.

  He’s publicity-shy because he’s ambitious. That may sound odd, but Mike’s background and career are odd. For starters, Mike’s dad—the locally famous Irish Svenson—was Grantham’s police chief. A building has been named after him, and a picture of his open, freckled face hangs in the main hall at the central police station.

  When his dad was chief, the nepotism laws of our state made it impossible for Mike to be hired by the Grantham Police Department—even though he had the right college degree and passed the aptitude test with flying colors. So at twenty-two Mike had joined the Chicago Police Department. He’d compiled a terrific record, according to his superiors there. (I once had to interview him, so I called and asked.) He spent eight years in Chicago and was trained as a detective and as a hostage negotiator.

  Then, two and a half years before, Mike’s dad had been killed. And six months later Mike left the Chicago force as a sergeant of detectives and joined the Grantham P.D. as a rookie patrolman.

  In Grantham, as in most police forces, everybody has to start as a rookie. So Mike gave up eight years of rank and benefits to come back to his hometown. He said it was because he got tired of the weather “up north.” But everybody in Grantham was sure it was because he wanted to be chief someday, and he thought he’d have a better chance in Grantham, where he was a hometown boy, than in a city with the population and politics of Chicago.

  This belief may be right. Mike’s never told me it’s true, but he doesn’t deny it, either.

  This belief made a lot of Grantham police officers regard Mike suspiciously. They either saw him as competition for promotion or as a guy who was able to pull strings for his personal benefit—after all, lots of the higher-ups in the department had been his father’s friends and protégés. Mike could easily have been the most hated guy in the department.

  Mike had dealt with this natural suspicion by hanging out with cops, by supporting department blood drives and sports teams and picnics, and by not asking or accepting special favors from the higher-ups. And never, never, not ever did he mention how things were done in Chicago.

  Part of his plan seemed to be keeping his name out of the news. I kidded him that he dated me only so he’d have an insider who was willing to cut any reference to him out of the Gazette. Not that I did. We treated him just like any other officer.

  Mike’s efforts to keep a low profile seemed to be working. Most of his fellow officers now considered him a regular guy, not a creep trying to ride his father’s coattails to success. Nobody but me and a few GPD officers who had worked closely with Mike seemed to have caught on that this image wasn’t exactly true.

  Mike wasn’t a “regular” guy. He was definitely special—self-confident, energetic, ambitious—and so intelligent he knew he’d attain his ambitions faster if he hid them. I knew Arnie would have to twist Mike’s arm to get him to sit still for an interview.

  Arnie dealt out the first cards of a solitaire hand, but something beeped. He stopped in mid-gesture, pulled his beeper from his belt, and looked at the number it displayed. He pushed the button that stopped the noise. “City desk,” he said. “Guess I’d better go on up.” He stubbed out his cigarette, told Mike it had been nice meeting him, and left.

  By now, despite interruptions and discussions, Mike and I had finished our sandwiches, and I began to gather up the debris. “Guess I’d better get back,” I said.

  Mike finished the final bite of his sub, then stared at me, frowning.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “I’ve been sitting here gathering data,” he said.

  “The five w’s and an h?”

  “What do you mean by that? Martina referred to them, too.”

  “Who, what, why, when, where and sometimes how. It’s the reporter’s litany. The elements each news story must contain. It’s the first thing you learn in your first journalism class.”

  “Oh. I’d like to concentrate on why.”

  “Yes, Officer?”

  “Martina gathered up a lot of information about her fellow employees, right?”

  “Right. She asked a lot of questions and she actually did research—looked into public records and dug things out of the library!”

  “What did she do with that information? Was she a blackmailer?”

  “You mean, for money? No, I’m sure she didn’t do that. Nobody around here has any money. I think she just liked to let you know she knew it. Like the way she rode me about our weekend in Dallas.”

  “Okay. Now let’s go on to how. Would anybody object if I took another look at the Hellhole?”

  Chapter 3

  I must have stared. Mike hadn’t acted as if he enjoyed the Hellhole any more than I did.

  “What are you up to?” I asked.

  “Just want to check the layout,” he said. “Will anybody mind?”

  “No. They give guided tours of the building all the time, and they include the basement. Of course, they don’t want anybody down there unaccompanied, because of the machinery. Poke the wrong button, and something could hurt you, or you could hurt it.”

  “I won’t touch a thing. Just look.”

  “I know you’re smart enough to keep your arms out of the press. But there’s no secret about anything down there. In fact, you haven’t really seen the point of a newspaper until you’ve seen the press run. And according to J.J. Jones, it’s about to start. I’ll see if I can take you down.”

  I called the city desk, and Jack didn’t sound too nervous, even though it was the first time he’d put out the paper on his own. Things weren’t too far out of control. He said I could take another ten or fifteen minutes of dinner break.

  “Do you want to go down from the other end of the building?” I asked. “Use the normal stairs?”

  “I think I can manage the scary ones.”

  As we went down the circular iron stairs Mike held the railing again, but he didn’t trip or have a nervous breakdown. We once again walked among the monolithic rolls of paper. But this time there were other people present. The pressmen had finished their dinner break, and a half dozen or so were working in the Hellhole.

  Maybe it was their presence—the knowledge that we weren’t alone—that made me wish we were alone. Anyway, when Mike brushed my shoulder, I had to battle the temptation to shove him into one of the niches between the rolls of newsprint and rip his clothes off. Of course, Mike never had to do much to make me feel that way.

  Mike was thirty-two and I was twenty-eight, and we’d both been around the block a couple of times before we met each other. We were both a little cynical, so we’d been stunned when we found ourselves involved in an adolescent love affair.

  In other words, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

  At first this had been no problem. We were consenting adults, after all, who knew all the rules about birth control. We both took part in blood drives, Mike at the Grantham P.D. and me at the Gazette, so we had up-to-date blood tests and weren’t worried about AIDS. Mike lived alone, in a house with a king-size bed and a terrific walk-in shower. I had roommates, but they didn’t worry if I didn’t come home. We had all the seclusion and sex we wanted. It had been a lot of fun.

  Then, two months earlier, we’d both shifted to night work, and Mike had begun the final push on the research and writing of his master’s thesis.

  The scheduling did not work out at all well for our personal lives. Mike went to work just after I got off. I was asleep when he got off. He was asleep by the time I got up. By the time he got up, I was ready to leave for work. To add to the confusion, I was working Tuesday through Saturday, with Sunday and Monday off, and he was working Sunday through Thursday, with Friday and
Saturday off.

  A little handholding on my forty-five-minute dinner break had become a major romantic interlude for us. And after two months of this schedule I was in the mood for a lot more than an hour snatched here and there.

  Besides, our personal deadline was staring me in the face.

  When we first fell for each other, Mike and I had agreed to give our relationship six months to grow. Six months in which we wouldn’t worry about the future, we’d simply enjoy the now. At the time it seemed to be a good plan. I had never fallen for anybody as violently as I’d fallen for Mike. Making this emotional turmoil into something that would last—sometimes it hadn’t seemed likely.

  But Christmas had come and gone, trees had leafed out and the spring storm season was starting. We were still seeing each other, and both of us still seemed to be in an almost continual state of sexual excitement. We’d become good friends as well as lovers.

  And in two weeks our six-month trial would be up.

  During the past five and a half months, I’d discovered that Mike was organized. I knew he’d probably written our six-month anniversary on his calendar. “Talk to Nell about hopes, plans, and dreams.” And he’d bring it up on the appointed date.

  The thought gave me a thrill, half hope and half fear. Mike had already told me that he was ready to settle down. Maybe have kids. He’d been brought up by loving parents in a strong family. He wanted to have a family like it.

  But my earliest memories were of the bitter quarrels between my parents. My father had left my mother and me. She had died, and I’d gone to live with her parents. They’d been kind and loving, but I’d had trouble dealing with my father’s desertion. Even after twenty years I worried about why he left me.

  Was I capable of being a partner in a solid, functional family? The kind Mike wanted and deserved? I wasn’t sure.

  But now, walking through the basement, just touching Mike’s arm, feeling him beside me—it was wonderful. Also frustrating, since we couldn’t act on our feelings. As we walked through the Hellhole, I compensated by talking brightly.

  “I’m always amazed to see how the pressmen can move these rolls around,” I said. “The full rolls weigh nearly a ton.”

  “Three quarters of a ton,” said a gruff voice behind us. “It’s like pushing a car. Once you get them going, it’s not that hard to move them.”

  I turned to find that a square-jawed man with bulky shoulders and a brush of crew-cut gray hair had come up behind us. It was Wes McLaird, the pressroom foreman.

  “Oh, Mr. McLaird,” I said. “You’re the expert on all this.” I introduced him to Mike. “Mike would like to see the press run. Will we be in the way?”

  “No, it’s all right,” Wes said. “Of course, this Used Car section is only twenty-four pages. Eight-four, eight-four. It’s not as impressive as a big Sunday paper. But we like to show off our press. And we’d sure like to change the impression Mike probably got when we nearly asphyxiated Mrs. Gilroy.”

  “You obviously have an operation that’s extremely careful about safety,” Mike said. “What do you think happened to her?”

  Wes frowned and shook his head. “We haven’t figured it out. Especially since you say there was a box of rags in that back hall when you found her.”

  “There was,” I said. “We both saw them. In fact, Mike scooped them into a heap and covered them up before he carried Martina out.”

  Wes shook his head. “Well, Bob Johnson says they weren’t there when he ran back to check after the accident. But Mrs. Gilroy sure did act like she’d been breathing those fumes.”

  We walked on, and Wes answered the questions Mike asked. Wes is one of the key employees of the Gazette, of course. The press is the single most expensive piece of equipment owned by a daily newspaper. And the most important piece of equipment. If the press is down, we can all go home.

  The typical reader probably doesn’t stop to think that a newspaper is a manufacturing plant. We’re not a public service or an entertainment medium or a bulletin board. We make something, something we hope the public will want to purchase, just like General Mills makes cereals or Ford automobiles. All the advertising and all the news stories in the world are useless unless Wes and his crew get that press rolling. And it wouldn’t roll if Wes and the other pressmen weren’t real experts on highly sophisticated pieces of machinery.

  We followed Wes back to the pressroom, and he led us down another set of metal stairs—these didn’t corkscrew—to the sub-basement, the bottom level of the press. He showed us the elevator that brought the giant rolls of paper from the floor above, the main storage area, to the level where they are actually loaded onto the press. I was concentrating on what Wes was saying when Bob Johnson came sailing by.

  Bob is short and bulky. He hardly has the physique of a figure skater. But he literally glided across the basement, coasting without moving his legs.

  “How’d he do that?” Mike asked.

  “Paper cart,” Wes said.

  “It’s like a skateboard for newsprint,” I said.

  Wes showed Mike the tracks for the paper carts. The tracks are embedded in the concrete floor of the basement. They serve as a roadbed for steel scooters that are for all the world like wide skateboards with concave tops. These are used to move the giant rolls of paper into position before they’re loaded onto the press. And they also give pressmen a quick ride across the basement.

  Of course, the paper carts and their rails serve only limited parts of the basement. Wes explained that the forklift is used to get the rolls into the correct area. Then the pressmen move the rolls by pushing them around.

  Bob Johnson rode the cart back and jumped off it. He glared at Mike and me. I wondered what was eating him, but I didn’t ask.

  Then Bob and Wes pulled out their paper knives—wicked-looking pocket knives with vicious curved blades. They slit the heavy brown paper that covered one roll of newsprint, and stripped the covering off. They rolled the giant cylinder toward a little ramp beside the track. Wes stepped back and let Bob push the roll.

  “See,” Wes said. “Once you get it going, it’s not hard to move.”

  “I can start it by myself,” Bob said angrily. He glared at us again, and I once more wondered why he was so mad.

  Wes’s lips tightened, and he glanced at Bob narrowly, then turned back to us. “The press is going to roll any minute,” he said.

  Mike nodded. “Do you mind if I take a look at the press? And at that back hall?”

  Wes escorted us to the metal stairway beside the press, and we went up a level, into the main pressroom. Wes pointed out the parts that would be cleaned with blanket wash. Then he showed us where the blanket wash was stored, where the bags of red commercial rags were kept, where the exhaust fan was installed, and where the drum for the used rags was placed.

  We sniffed and nodded. “That’s what we smelled,” I said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” Wes said. “But I don’t understand it, either. You see that this drum has just this little opening.” He pointed at a small opening in the top. “The rags go in there, and they aren’t taken out again. The whole drum goes to the laundry.”

  J.J. Jones, green sports jacket and all, came from the other end of the pressroom then, and he, Mike, and I—the pressroom outsiders—stood in a little clump near the door to the paper-storage area.

  All the time we’d been talking to Wes, men had been moving around, and a bell had been giving short blasts. These indicated that the huge rollers on the rotary press were being moved so that plates could be placed on them.

  Now the bell gave a longer blast, and a humming sound began.

  “They’re starting up,” Wes said. He went to the nearest wall and reached down three sets of ear protectors. He held them out to Mike and me. “Have some earmuffs.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t stay but a minute,” I said.

  “I have to leave, too,” Mike said. He shook Wes’s hand and thanked him for the tour.

  Then
Wes stepped over to a control panel that would have been right at home on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. He punched buttons, and with a rumble that grew in intensity, the press started. The rollers of the press began to move, and the paper began to fly by, speeding along in an intricate maze that shot up high, then down low, ran under cutters, folded itself and refolded itself in an astonishing pattern.

  The noise was incredible. The clicking, clacking, rumbling and roaring made it plain why the Gazette, as well as OSHA, required the pressmen to use ear protectors.

  In less than thirty seconds neatly folded newspapers began to move along a conveyor belt. The first ones were blank, and a pressman grabbed them off and tossed them into a giant wastebasket. But within a minute the papers spewing out were covered with a colorful design. Six-inch letters reading USED CARS almost jumped off the page.

  J.J. grabbed one off the conveyer belt and rapidly began to look through it. I knew he was checking that nothing obvious was wrong—no pages out of order, no datelines with the wrong date. It was too late to make editing changes, but they’d stop the press for a serious error.

  Wes and the other pressmen also snatched up samples from the conveyer belt. They looked through them rapidly. One man checked nothing but page numbers. They were checking for technical quality as well as the order of pages. The noise kept them from communicating by talking, of course, but they punched pages with their fingers and held them up for Wes to see. Wes made adjustments at his space-age control panel.

  After a few minutes I looked at Mike questioningly. He nodded, and we waved at Wes and mouthed our thanks again. I took one of the Used Car sections, and we moved back into the paper-storage area. I turned down the hall where we’d found the rags, the hall that led to Martina’s hideaway and, beyond it, to the stairs that ended at the alley door.

  The door between the Hellhole and that hall had been open earlier, but now I closed it. The noise was cut dramatically.