Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking Read Online Free Page A

suppose I should ask a few questions.” He pulled out his notebook. How are you enjoying the tour? he asked. Which cities have you visited so far? How is the book selling? And then: “Oh, by the way, somebody once told me that one should list one’s questions in order from Kind to Cruel, so here comes the Cruel one: How does a person of your alleged radical persuasion square her conscience living it up in this super-posh hotel?” Covered with confusion, I hedged and glugged, finally managing to get out the lame response “Well, my publisher is paying for it.”
    LUCK. In my experience luck has always figured large, so often have I accidentally chanced upon invaluable slivers of information volunteered by informants who happened to know something about my subject.
    This was especially true while I was writing The American Way of Death; it seemed that countless people wanted to get into this strange act with their own horror stories. One such shocker: a friend told me about making arrangements for her brother-in-law’s funeral. She had steadfastly insisted on the cheapest redwood coffin available, but the undertaker said the brother-in-law was too tall to fit into it, she would have to take a more expensive one. When she objected, he said, “Oh, all right, we’ll use the redwood, but we’ll have to cut off his feet.” This grisly little anecdote, which came my way just as the book was going to press, was eventually seized on by reviewers as one of the more telling examples of funeral salesmanship.
    Another incident that illustrates the luck factor: I was curious to know what happens about funeral arrangements in the event of mass disaster, such as plane crashes in remote mountain areas. Do competing undertakers from nearby communities converge upon the scene in a wild scramble for the business? What would typical costs be, and who pays—the airline or the next of kin? Questions like these, I thought, could best be answered by a lawyer who, like the undertaker, makes his living out of such tragedies: one who specializes in personal injury cases. I called up Melvin Belli, San Francisco’s best-known practitioner in this line (nicknamed by the press “King of Torts”), and explained in detail what I was after.
    Belli, never averse to publicity, readily gave me an appointment. I arrived promptly—and sat for five hours in his reception room while a parade of the lame, halt, and blind, some on crutches, some in wheelchairs, wearing surgical collars or plaster casts, filed past me into his inner office. By the time Belli came out, I was steaming with rage at being kept waiting for all that time, the more so when he admitted he actually had no information on the subject of my visit. Perhaps to mollify me, he said he did have an old trial transcript that might be of interest, and he sprinted up a huge ceiling-high ladder to fetch it down from a top shelf. The transcript (which had nothing whatsoever to do with plane crashes) proved to be a gem of rare fascination: a lawsuit brought against an undertaker charging negligence and fraud for his failure to properly embalm the plaintiff’s ninety-nine-year-old mother. The Q. and A. examination of the plaintiff by Mr. Belli made for one of the most bizarre, and successful, passages in The American Way of Death: although in the excitement of this discovery I forgot all about the plane crash possibilities and never did follow through on this.
    BLIND ALLEYS. The converse of luck is blind alleys. Lest it appear from the comments in this collection that efficient investigation follows a straight and easily traversed path, that normally everything comes clattering neatly into place, I should say that I have come to expect blind alleys as a major natural hazard of investigating. Looking over old notebooks, full of “Possible Sources,” and lists of “Things to Do,” I see that I could fill a volume with accounts of endless days laboriously spent pursuing false leads—which would