laid across four sawhorses to form a desk. Behind it sat a massive man in a wheelchair, like a stone idol on a gleaming steel-and-chrome display stand. He had a large, squarish head, with wavy light-brown hair, combed straight back without a part, going white at the temples. His ears were small, flat against his skull, without lobes. Heavy cheekbones separated a pair of iron-colored eyes from thin lips; his nose was long and narrow; a dark mole dotted the right side of his jaw. The man was dressed in a banker’s-gray suit, a starched white shirt, and a midnight-blue silk tie with faint flecks of gold that occasionally caught the light. On the ring finger of his right hand was a blue star sapphire, set in platinum.
The man glanced at his left wrist, where a large-faced watch on a white-gold band peeked out from under a French cuff, then looked up at the driver of the Chevy.
“I was held up at the gate,” Harley said. “Seth took about half a day to . . .”
Nobody said anything.
Harley took a chair, and followed their example.
* * *
1959 September 28 Monday 21:39
* * *
“Procter!” a sandpaper voice blasted through the half-empty news-room.
All eyes turned toward a broad-shouldered man hunched over a typewriter. “What’s up, Chief?” he shouted back, without breaking his hunt-and-peck rhythm, eyes never leaving the keyboard.
“Get the hell in here!”
The broad-shouldered man kept on typing.
A pair of night-shift reporters at adjoining desks exchanged looks. One scrawled “2” on a piece of paper and held it up; the other crossed his two forefingers to make a “plus” sign. Each man reached for his wallet without looking, eyes focused on four large clocks on the far wall, marked, from left to right: Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, and New York.
In perfect rhythm honed by long practice, a dollar bill was simultaneously slapped down on each man’s desk.
The second hands of the clocks swept on. One full revolution, then another. Two minutes and seventeen seconds had elapsed when . . .
“Procter, goddamn it!” rattled the windows.
The reporter who had made the “plus” sign plucked the dollar from the other’s desk as Procter slowly got to his feet. His hair was as black as printer’s ink; raptor’s eyes sat deeply on either side of a slightly hawked nose. Wearing a blue shirt with the cuffs rolled above thick wrists, and a dark-red tie loosened at the throat, he stalked through the newsroom holding several sheets of typescript in his right hand like a cop carrying a nightstick.
Procter ambled into a corner office formed from two pebbled-glassed walls. Behind a cigarette-scarred, paper-covered desk sat a doughy man wearing half-glasses on the bridge of a bulbous nose. His bald scalp was fringed with thick mouse-brown hair.
“Chief?” Procter said innocently.
“How many goddamn times have I told you not to call me that?” the doughy man snapped, his scalp reddening. “You’ve got a lot of choices in that department, Jimmy. ‘Mr. Langley’ will do. So will ‘Augie,’ you like that better. Save that ‘Chief’ stuff for your next editor.”
“So I’m fired?” Procter said, his voice not so much empty as without inflection of any kind.
“I didn’t say that!” the doughy man bellowed. “You know damn well what I meant. This isn’t one of those big-city sheets you’re used to working for. We do things differently around here.”
“I’ve been around here all my life,” Procter said, mildly. “Born and raised.”
“You like playing word games, maybe you want to take over the crossword. You haven’t been around this newspaper all your life. You came home, that’s what happened.”
“Came home after being fired, you mean.”
“I say what I mean, Jimmy. You’re a great newshound, but this is your fourth paper in, what, seven years? We both know you wouldn’t be working for the Compass if there was still a place for you with one of the big-city tabs.”
“I—”
“And we both know, soon as a job on a real paper opens up again, you’ll be on the next bus out of here.”
“I can do what I do anywhere.”
“Is that right? For such a smart guy, you do some pretty stupid things. What happened up in Chi-Town, anyway?”
“The editor spiked too many of my stories,” Procter said, in the bored tone of a man retelling a very old story.
“So you went behind his back and peddled your stuff to that Communist rag?”
“That exposé never saw a blue pencil, Chief. They printed it just like I wrote it.”