True Crime Read Free Page B

went home that night in what must have been one of her blacker moods. She lay on the bed in her loft for about three hours, brooding as the last of the summer day died. After a while, she smoked a joint to loosen her clutched nerves.
    Her loft, as I say, was a crazy place, huge, somber, furnished as her room in college had been with boxes, and dust balls, stacks of old newspapers and half-read books and tracts. It was on the third floor of a white brick warehouse that had been home to the
Globe-Democrat
before it went under. The newspaper’s sign with its globe logo still hung over the door outside. Only one of the other lofts in the place was occupied, and the street the building was on was a bland industrial corridor—gas stations, car lots and fast food joints—that bled up into the slums of the north. But Michelle loved that loft intensely, felt it around her intensely: because of the globe logo and because it was one block away from the
Post-Dispatch
and a block and a half from the
News
itself. Because it reeked for her with the scent, shone for her with the aura of
newspapers. Newspapers
, which had been big with romance for her in school. Agents for social change, history on the instant, battlegrounds of opinion. She had believed all that nonsense. She loved newspapers. Even now. She loved them still.
    Today, however, the place only depressed her further. As the yellow stripes of the sinking sun withdrew into the slits of the venetian blinds and faded away, she sucked her reefer and peered through the smoke at those boxes strewn everywhere. Boxes filled with loose papers and notebooks and crumpled documents. Overflowing with details, with facts, with the forgotten minutiae of the stories she worked on. Scraps that she collected with the helpless instinct of an autumn squirrel. They had her buried in them, she told herself. Alan Mann. Bob Findley. They had her drowning in details, petty facts, minutiae. When she thought about the things she had written in college … Big things that mattered. Theories that had made her the star of the Women’s Studies Department at Wellesley. Harridan and Eunuch University, I used to call it, when I wanted to get a rise out of her. She had felt brilliant there. Dissecting racism and patriarchy; exposing the oppressiveness of European culture; expounding on Foucault—sweet Foucault!—and the inner tyranny of free societies. In those bygone days, she had felt that intellectual sweep of comprehension known only to adolescents, psychopaths and college professors. And now she was swamped and stuck and sinking in these boxes, these scraps, these meaningless, sweepless details.
    And what depressed her most, what made her sick at heart as she lay toking on the bed, was that she had begun to realize—had begun, at least, to half suspect—that this was the very reason she had taken the job at the
News
. She had begun to half confess to herself that she loved these boxes, their crumpled pieces of paper, their insignificant and disparatefacts—these
stories
—more than she loved the Women’s Studies Department at dear old Harridan and Eunuch U.
    So she sat in the loft for about three hours, brooding and smoking, until her forehead felt acres wide and her brain was floating in it. Then, no less nervy than she’d been before, she jumped up and headed out the door into the empty urban territories of Sunday night.
    She drove her little red Datsun down to Laclede’s Landing by the river, hoping to find some activity there, some life. For the next half hour or so, she haunted the cobbled lanes between the red-brick buildings, wandering from old-fashioned streetlamp to streetlamp, sniffing loftily at the passing shadows of tourists and their children: the Great American Ignorant, who did not know what she knew. At last, she alighted in a jazz joint that had remained open for just this degraded trade. She set herself up alone at a small round table and started drinking bourbon with a fine