Southside (9781608090563) Read Online Free PDF Page B

he’s bound to get some enemies. We’re thinking this wasn’t random. Not at five p.m. on 2nd and Broadway.”
    An hour later and several reporters later, Hart turned to LaBarbera, the two of them alone in the editor’s office. “You remember that story Lyons wrote on Big Evil?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œThat’s when I met him, when he was working on that story.”
    â€œBest gang story the
Times
ever had,” LaBarbera said. “Lyons hung with Evil tight. And I know it wasn’t just a bullshit story.”
    â€œI know it,” said Hart. “You remember Leslie Harrington, the deputy D.A. on Evil’s case, right?”
    â€œOf course. What the fuck. How could I forget? What about her?”
    â€œEven Leslie told me Lyons knew things about Evil that she didn’t know, and if she knew then what he knew, she would’ve gone for the death penalty.”
    â€œOnce,” LaBarbera said, “I met Mike down on Hoover. ‘Round 57th Street. ‘Bout ten, twelve years ago. At first we thought gang,drug-related. You know, three Mexican guys in one house. But, turns out, this guy living at his cousin’s house? He got pissed about something and wasted his cousin and his friends. So Mike is there walking the ‘hood for hours, gets the whole story. Finds out all these details about the vics. I remember the cousin, the dead one. He was working sixty hours and going to school to be a nurse. I always remember that.”
    â€œUmph, a male nurse,” said Hart. “Usually they’re Filipinos.”
    â€œAnyway,” Sal continued. “‘Bout seven or so, he calls me. All pissed. He said the city editor told him, ‘It’s just Hoover Street. We’re gonna make that story a brief.’ Man, he was so pissed. I thought he was gonna go off. I had to kind of cool him down myself.”
    â€œSounds like Lyons,” said Hart.
    Hart and LaBarbera considered their suspects. The chef ex-husband of Lyons’s girlfriend had been in Colorado when the shooting occurred. Most killings or shootings are committed by the favorites—rival gang members, fellow gang members, husbands, wives, neighbors. But, long shots do come in. Even Man o’ War got beat once. By a horse named Upset.

CHAPTER 6
    As Lyons floated in and out of his morphine-induced stupor, editors and reporters gathered in Editor Duke Collinsworth’s large office to discuss how to advance the story.
    â€œWhat’s new? What do we have?” asked Collinsworth, a distinguished, silver-haired man who looked like a prototype editor. A sixty-three-year-old Southern gentlemen who enjoyed twenty-year-old Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve bourbon with one drop of water, had a wife he met at Duke forty-four years ago, a long, slow smile, and a quest to reverse the recent cutbacks that had badly gutted the paper. “How we going to play it today?”
    â€œWell, my sources tell me detectives don’t have any eyewitnesses yet, but they think it was gang related,” said Goldstein.
    â€œNo eyewitnesses. It was at 2nd and Broadway at rush hour. There must’ve been at least twenty cars within a hundred feet. Have a news aide count cars at that corner for ten minutes,” Collinsworth said. “Someone saw that shooting. Any thought the gunman had a silencer?”
    â€œNo,” said Goldstein. “The bartender at the Redwood said he heard the shots from inside the bar.”
    Collinsworth shook his head. “A real whodunit. This is a great story. Too bad he’s one of us. Anyway, what’s going on with the police?”
    Goldstein prattled on without saying anything of substance until Tinder cut him off. “How about we do this for a follow? Something like detectives are pursuing leads, including a list of potential suspectsthat they gathered from colleagues of Lyons. We update his condition. Have Greg get a quote from Mike. Even