The Scarecrow Read Online Free Page B

go out. I had written at
     least a thousand murder stories in my time. I was going to write one more. A story that would stand as the tombstone on my
     career. A story that would make them remember me after I was gone.

    T he weekend was a blur of alcohol, anger and humiliation as I grappled with a new future that was no future. After briefly
     sobering up on Saturday morning I opened the file that held my novel in progress and began reading. I soon saw what my ex-wife
     had seen long ago. What I should have seen long ago. It wasn’t there and I was kidding myself if I thought it was.
    The conclusion was that I would have to start from scratch if I was going to go this way, and the thought of that was debilitating.
     When I took a cab back to the Short Stop to get my car, I ended up staying and closing the place out early Sunday morning,
     watching the Dodgers lose again and drunkenly telling complete strangers about how fucked up the
Times
and the whole newspaper business was.
    It took me all the way into Monday morning to get cleaned up. I rolled in forty-five minutes late to work after finally getting
     my car at the Short Stop and I could still smell the alcohol coming out of my pores.
    Angela Cook was already sitting at my desk in a chair she had borrowed from one of the empty cubicles. There had been a lot
     of them since they’d started the buyouts and the layoffs.
    “Sorry I’m late, Angela,” I said. “It was kind of a lost weekend. Starting with the party on Friday. You should have come.”
    She smiled demurely, like she knew there had been no party, just a one-man wake.
    “I got you some coffee but it’s probably cold by now,” she said.
    “Thanks.”
    I picked up the cup she had gestured to and it had indeed cooled. But the good thing about the
Times
cafeteria was free refills—at least they hadn’t changed that yet.
    “Tell you what,” I said. “Let me go check in with the desk and if nothing’s happening we can go get refills and talk about
     how you’re going to take over.”
    I left her there and walked out of podland and over toward the Metro desk. On the way I stopped at the switchboard. It sat
     like a lifeguard stand in the middle of the newsroom, built high so that the operators could look out across the vast newsroom
     and see who was in and able to receive calls. I stepped to the side of the station so one of the operators could look down
     and see me.
    It was Lorene, who had been on duty the Friday before. She raised a finger to tell me to hold. She handled two quick transfers
     and then pulled one side of her headset off her left ear.
    “I don’t have anything for you, Jack,” she said.
    “I know. I want to ask about Friday. You transferred a call to me late in the afternoon from a lady named Wanda Sessums. Would
     there be any record of her phone number? I forgot to ask for it.”
    Lorene shoved her headset back in place and handled another call. Then without pulling her ear free she told me she didn’t
     have the number. She had not written it down at the time and the system only kept an electronic list of the last five hundred
     calls to come in. It had been more than two days since Wanda Sessums had called for me and the switchboard got close to a
     thousand calls a day.
    Lorene asked if I had called 411 to try to get the number. Sometimes the basic starting point was forgotten. I thanked her
     and headed on to the desk. I had called information at home and already knew there was no listing for Wanda Sessums.
    The city editor at the moment was a woman named Dorothy Fowler. It was one of the most transient jobs at the paper, a position
     both political and practical and one that seemed to have a revolving door attached to it. Fowler had been a damn good government
     reporter and was only eight months into trying her hand at commanding the crew of city-side reporters. I wished her well but
     kind of knew it was impossible for her to succeed, given all the cutbacks on resources