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Missourian
to the
Cedar Rapids Gazette
, peaking at the
Omaha World-Herald
, where, after a three-day run on the really fine pharmaceutical Dexedrine, he got in a violent one-sided argument with the city editor. One-sided because the city editor didn’t understand a word he was saying.
    “He sounds like a chicken. He thinks he’s using words, but he’s just going puck-puck-puck-puck puck,” he told the executive editor, as they both peered through the blinds on the executive editor’s office. Conley was flapping his wings around the city desk.
    From there it was Sioux Falls, South Dakota, then Worthington, Minnesota, then through a run of smaller and smaller rural towns, finally landing, at forty-five, at the
Trippton Republican-River
, which was mostly supermarket advertisements, with a smattering of school board news, sheriff’s news, county commission news, city council news, and paid obituaries.
    Then, in Trippton, Conley had inadvertently discovered that the school board was stealing the school system blind, taking out nearly a million dollars a year from a budget of thirty-nine million. It was all hard to see—for example, who really knew if the school buses got ten miles per gallon or eight, or exactly where they got the stuff that went into school lunches?—but it added up.
    Conley got the first tip from a school bus driver who knew how much diesel her Blue Bird used, and how much the school said she used. The same driver suggested that he talk to a lady who worked in the high school cafeteria, about food costs. The anecdotal information had been confusing, but suggestive. Then Conley stole a confidential school budget document that made it all perfectly clear.
    He was thinking about the document as he puffed alongHighway A, going west out of Trippton, the night after the school board meeting. He’d started running every night, because it was one thing he’d once done well. He was now twenty pounds overweight, but had been forty pounds overweight at his forty-fifth birthday. The discovery of the school board embezzlement had stirred some of the original journalistic vinegar in Conley’s veins. He’d stopped drinking, mostly, and didn’t do speed more than twice a week. His weight was down, his brain was clearer.
    He was even thinking that after he broke the school story, and moved to a bigger paper, he might actually start looking for something with tits. So his life was changing for the better. His biggest current problem would be explaining how he got the detailed budgetary information.
    He didn’t cover the school board himself; the paper’s editor, Viking Laughton, did that. And the bare fact was, he’d broken into the school finance office on several weekend nights, cracked the finance officer’s computer, and had taken photographs of the computer screens over fifteen nerve-racking hours.
    It had taken him the best part of six months, and two more break-ins, to winkle out all the details. He’d then confided the findings to Viking “Vike” Laughton, the fat man who owned the newspaper.
    Vike had been astonished: “I never saw it in them. They must be taking out a hundred thousand dollars a year, each of them.”
    “Something like that,” Conley agreed.
    Vike told him to keep it all top secret. “This here’s a Pulitzer Prize, boy, if we play it just right,” he said, slapping his hands on printouts of the budget documents.
    Vike suggested Jennifer Houser as the one likeliest to turn on the others—he’d been covering the school board himself, for years, and was familiar with all the members.
    Conley had finally gotten to Houser just that afternoon.
    “This is going in the paper next week, Jen,” he’d told her. “Everybody’s going down, but when the police arrive, I’ll tell them that you were the person who cracked the case. I’m sure, if you cooperate, they’ll take it easy on you. You might have to do a little jail time, but you ask anybody who’s been to jail, and