Rogue Island Read Free Page B

there are forty shots from the seventh. Want to see them? Twenty-eight bad exposures and twelve artsy close-ups of Roselli’s left thumb.”

5
    Next morning, my eyes were among two dozen pairs trained on Veronica. It was hard to know what the women were thinking. The men, not so much.
    She stood in the middle of the newsroom, an unlit Virginia Slim dangling from plum-tinged lips. She had taken to chewing on the filters since the publisher’s no-smoking edict. Now that I was fond enough of Veronica to care about her health, I had to concede the ban was a good thing, even though it kicked me to the curb for my daily Cuban.
    Still, it rankled. The ban was another of those incremental changes that had turned our traditional newsroom into an urban-renewal project gone bad. Gone were the overflowing ashtrays, the banks of dented metal desks, the ink-stained tile floor, and the harsh fluorescent lights that forced copy editors to wear green eyeshades. The clacking typewriters had disappeared during my first year on the job, and I still missed their staccato beat. Now we had recessed lighting, a maroon carpet, and computers humming on fake butcher-block desks. The desks were walled off with four-foot-high dividers so you had to stand up to ask your neighbor how to spell delicatessen, then strain to hear him say “Look it up, asshole.” Turning the newsroom into an insurance office had cost a lot of money, but it hadn’t made the daily paper any better.
    It took somebody like Veronica to do that. This morning, her story on the federal labor-racketeering grand jury, with direct quotes from the clever perjury of Giuseppe “the Cheeseman” Arena, was stripped across page one. Even the managing editor had ventured out of his office to join in the attaboys. If he hadn’t blown so much on carpeting and room dividers, maybe he could have given her a raise.
    This made the third time this year that Veronica had gotten big hunks of secret grand-jury testimony into a story. Each time, the U.S. attorney demanded to know how she had done it. Each time, she politely told him to stuff it. When I asked her how she was managing it, she just Mona Lisa smiled. The smile made me forget what I’d asked.
    I forced myself to stop leering, logged on, and found a message from Lomax:
    S EE ME.
    As I sauntered to his desk, he shot me that opportunities-in-retailing look.
    â€œListen, boss …”
    â€œNo, you listen. The dog story wasn’t in the paper yesterday. It wasn’t in the paper today. It had better be in the paper tomorrow.”
    â€œWhy not give it to Hardcastle? He’s got a touch with the fluff.”
    â€œI gave it to you, Mulligan. I know you think you’ve got better things to do, but let me explain something to you. Circulation has been falling sixty papers a month for the past five years. The most common reason people give for dropping the paper is that they don’t have time to read. Know what the second most common reason is?”
    â€œCNN? The Colbert Report ? Matt Drudge? Yahoo!?”
    â€œNo, but you can bet those are some of the reasons they don’t have time for the paper anymore. The second reason is they think we print too much bad news.”
    â€œI know how they feel,” I said, but Lomax was still talking, running over my words like a snowplow flattening a paperboy.
    â€œWe need good-news stories like a gangbanger needs bullets. It’s hard to find good news. It’s not every day that a scientist finds a cure for cancer or a Good Samaritan opens fire at a Democratic fund-raiser. So when good news smacks you in the face, you’ve got to write it. And the dog story is a genuine, honest-to-God good-news story.”
    â€œBut …”
    â€œNo buts. I’m not crazy about fluff, either, but we’ve got to give readers what they want if we’re going to be able to keep giving them what they need. The Internet and the