A Confidential Source Read Online Free PDF

carted away to
     the morgue. At the station, I was allowed to use the phone, and I called in the basic facts about the shooting to the newsroom.
     Dorothy had asked me to come downtown when I was finished with the police.
    Now she leaned over my shoulder and read my copy from the screen.
    Barry Mazursky, 57, was a father of three. He and his wife lived in Cranston, where he was active in several veterans’ and
     community-action organizations. A Vietnam veteran, Mazursky was licensed to own a handgun, which was found on the floor. Police
     said it appeared that Mazursky had attempted to pull a weapon in self-defense.
    Dorothy was squinting at the text in a way that wasn’t good. Then she dragged a chair from an empty quadrant of desks and
     sat down beside me. Her head tilted thoughtfully as she reread the copy, deciding exactly what it was about it that she didn’t
     like.
    “It’s not that this is bad…,” she began.
    I was too numb, too frozen to reread my lead, to try to guess what was bothering her.
    “It’s just that anybody could have written it.”
    I was silent a minute, digesting her meaning.
    “You can’t pretend to be objective on something like this. You’ve got to put yourself into the story. A first-person account
     that tells the readers what it was like to be inside that store. How you felt when you heard the gun.”
    “I didn’t witness the actual murder.” I’d learned that from the police: From a strictly legal perspective, even if I could
     identify the guy in the parka, I could only place him in front of the dairy case ten minutes or more before the murder. No
     matter what my heart told me, I hadn’t actually seen him commit the murder. I’d only seen the back of a khaki parka and a
     panty-hose mask fleeing the scene.
    “Didn’t you tell me you tried to give the guy CPR?” Dorothy asked.
    The shiver began at the base of my neck.
    Dorothy must have seen it. “Maybe it’s too much for you. You’re probably in some kind of shock. If you aren’t up to writing
     the kind of story I’m talking about, I understand.”
    She was right. I wasn’t up to writing the kind of story she was talking about. I hadn’t wanted to think about what it was
     like to hear the gunshot, or what it had felt like to see the bullet hole in Barry’s forehead, to pound his chest and not
     be able to help him. And I hadn’t wanted to think about what might have happened to me if I hadn’t headed back to the deli
     counter.
    The shiver again. My fingertips were frozen and my wrists ached. As I pulled my blue-jean jacket tighter around me, I knew.
     This wasn’t journalistic distance, but some form of physical shock. The protective wadding of my numbness would not last.
     No matter how I tried to block out the pictures, they were going to flash through my head. I’d see Barry, the toppled magazines,
     and the cold, hard expression of the man in the parka for days, maybe months. The tears would come, whether I got a story
     out of it or not.
    Dorothy was waiting. She caught my eye, trying to transmit her patience, her understanding. She would accept my decision not
     to write this story and maybe even be grateful because she could go home earlier. But she’d think less of me for it. There
     was a certain journalism machismo I’d be lacking. A clarity in her mind’s eye about why I’d left big-city reporting for public
     relations and cocktail waitressing. Why I was now exiled to a bureau.
    I thought of the opening on the investigative team and reminded myself that I was only a low-level witness to this crime,
     technically incapable of identifying the killer. I thought about all the reporters who went to truly dangerous places: Vietnam,
     Iraq, Afghanistan. “Is this for page one?” I asked.
    “Only if you’re up to it.”
    “I’m up to it,” I said, turning to the computer and forcing my fingers back to the keys.
    From the deli, I could hear the door swing open, but I didn’t think much about