The Black Door Read Free Page B

desk would soon be wondering about me. Yet Kanter showed no impatience, and I was anxious to tell it all.
    “Naturally, I had to account to the police for having found the body. At first, I said that I was just running down the story, and got lucky. That would have satisfied most detectives, I suppose. But I was dealing with the chief of detectives, a guy named Nazario, a Spanish-American cop who’s just about as sharp and perceptive as they come. If he were blond and blue-eyed, he’d probably be an outstanding criminologist. He might make it yet, in fact.”
    “I know. I’ve heard of him.”
    “Yeah. Anyhow, Nazario kept picking at me, the way I’d seen him examine hundreds of suspects, just sitting back and sniping. After a half hour or so of that, I told him the whole story.”
    “What’d he say?”
    “Briefly, he wasn’t too enthusiastic. He said my story made the San Jose police department look like the south end of a northbound horse, as you put it. Then he reminded me, with no particular tact, that without his co-operation I’d find my job a lot tougher in the future.”
    “So you wrote the story straight. With the San Jose police department as the hero.”
    “Right.”
    “What happened then?”
    “Well, I finished it about one in the morning, and the brass at the paper felt pretty good about it. Everyone was pounding me on the back. I was just about to go home when an A.P. man showed up. ‘What’s this about you and ESP?’ he asked.”
    Kanter smiled. “You got scooped on your own scoop, in other words. How’d he find out?”
    “I never knew. I do know that, the following day, one of Nazario’s detectives got busted all the way back to patrolman. So I always figured that was the leak.”
    “What happened then?”
    “As you say, I’d gotten scooped on my own scoop. By that time, the managing editor was out of bed, and in about three short minutes I’d gone from hero to goat. From his point of view, of course, I’d committed a sacrilege. After I got him cooled down, I tried to explain the whole thing, that the decision was Nazario’s, not mine. Whereupon the managing editor really started to howl. ‘Managed news,’ he squawked. ‘Freedom of the press.’ ‘Democracy.’ Then he called up the publisher. By this time, it was two in the morning, and the A.P. man had left to file his story. Next the publisher arrives, complete with topcoat worn over silk pajamas. He called up his friend the police commissioner and started in with freedom of the press and managed news and democracy all over again. Meanwhile, I ducked out and tried to warn Nazario, but the desk sergeant wouldn’t give me Nazario’s home phone number. The desk sergeant, by the way, also got busted to a patrolman. So, the next morning, Nazario picked up the paper and read precisely the story I’d agreed not to write. Then he got a call from the police commissioner, who asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, managing the news and abridging the freedom of the press and threatening the fiber of democracy.”
    “But you, in the meantime, had become a celebrity. An overnight celebrity.”
    I nodded. It was now almost eleven. But I didn’t care. I would sit there as long as Kanter would sit. My story wasn’t finished.
    “You were written up in Time,” he continued, amused now.
    I nodded.
    “And Newsweek.”
    I nodded.
    “And you got an offer to come to the Sentinel as their resident clairvoyant.”
    I must have groaned.
    “You’ve been ballyhooed. Romanced. Your picture has been displayed on the Sentinel’s newspaper racks and also on both sides of their trucks.”
    I didn’t reply.
    “And the San Francisco Police Department, to a man, hates you. They think you’re a charlatan. Or, worse, a publicity seeker, finding fame at the expense of hard-working, harassed, underpaid cops.”
    I looked at him. “They’re not the only ones. There’re agnostics everywhere.”
    “I know,” he said thoughtfully. “But