Fall from Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

running to confirm our stories; they check us, you got that?”
    Whittaker nodded, but couldn’t stop herself from talking. Despite the situation she was in, I had to give her some credit for standing up for herself. “I just wanted to confirm the details in Leo’s story.”
    “Then next time you want to confirm something in one of our reporter’s stories, don’t accuse them of fabricating something. I’m sure Leo has the answers you wanted, and if you had asked him nicely, he would gladly have given those answers. It looks to me like you just let some past baggage get in the way of your normally good judgment. If we’re going to remake this paper into what it was, then everyone has to put that baggage behind him and work together.”
    Whittaker nodded. “Yes, you’re right. You’re right.” Even though Whittaker agreed in public, I knew that she didn’t completely agree in private. In fact, I knew there were a lot of staffers who weren’t interested in working together and were just biding their time, waiting for Maurizo to be fired or, most likely, promoted, or for better options, like a new job, to come their way. None of this was likely to come anytime soon so this kind of dysfunction was here to stay. I couldn’t help but smile at the silliness of the situation, and unfortunately, Maurizo noticed it and thought I was smiling at Whittaker getting the shit kicked out of her.
    “And you got nothing to smile at, Desroches,” he said, turning on me. “You arrived twenty minutes before deadline and when your editor calls you on it and asks about an anomalous fact in your story, you get All the President’s Men on her. Next time get back on time and don’t be such a jerk, okay?”
    I nodded, realizing that there was no point in pursuing the matter further. Maurizo was quite aware of my history and no doubt my late arrival was twigging some alarm he had set when he first hired me. I would have to be more careful from now on.
    “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen,” Maurizo said to both of us. “We’re going to run Leo’s online story as is and Whittaker, you’re going to tell Leo he did a nice job for getting a scoop.”
    “Nice job, Leo.” Whittaker nodded. “It’s a good scoop.”
    “And you, Leo,” Maurizo continued, “you’re going to apologize to Whittaker for being a jerk and for being late and then fill us in on what happened out there.”
    I fulfilled all requests and when I was finished, Maurizo stepped in. “Okay, what do we know about this Whitford character? Anderson, you were in on this, so help us out.”
    Anderson tried to look surprised that Maurizo had noticed him, but when he realized he wasn’t in trouble, he offered to help. “He’s a homicide detective, good guy, good cop, helpful if he can be. But this seems to be totally out of character. I have never heard of any reporter being allowed into a crime scene tent.”
    Maurizo nodded. “Right. Leo, how do you know Whitford so that he would let you into the tent?”
    “To be honest, this is the first time I’ve had any dealings with him while I’ve been at the paper. He just knows.” I paused, not sure how to explain how Whitford and I met. “I guess you could just say, he knows me from before.”
    Maurizo nodded again. “Right,” he said, and nothing else. Of all the staffers at the paper, he was the only one who knew what the term from before meant to me. It had come up a couple of other times in my half year at the paper and I knew that it was a topic of much gossip and speculation. A few thought it meant that Maurizo and I had simply worked together on another newspaper in another time and place and left it at that. That was something that we had never denied; in fact, a couple of times, over drinks after a deadline, I had admitted that I had given the ME his first newspaper job.
    But there were other theories ranging from stories that I was an alcoholic or a drug addict and had lived on the streets to