The Scarecrow Read Online Free PDF Page A

sharks.
    All city-side reporters were assigned to an ace as the first level of direction and management. My ace was Alan Prendergast, who handled all the cop and court reporters. As such, he had a later shift, usually coming in around noon, because news that came off the law enforcement and justice beats most of the time developed late in the day.
    This meant my first check-in of the day was usually with Dorothy Fowler or the deputy city editor, Michael Warren. I always tried to make it Fowler because she ranked higher and Warren and I never got along. This might have had something to do with the fact that long before I had come to the Times , I had worked for the Rocky Mountain News out of Denver and had encountered Warren and competed with him on a major story. He had acted unethically and for that I could never trust him as an editor.
    Dorothy had her eyes glued to a screen and I had to say her name to get her attention. We hadn’t talked since I’d been pink-slipped so she immediately looked up at me with a sympathetic frown you might reserve for someone you just heard had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
    “Come inside, Jack,” she said.
    She stood up and left the raft and headed to her seldom-used office. She sat behind her desk but I stayed standing because I knew this would be quick.
    “I just want to say we are really going to miss you around here, Jack.”
    I nodded my thanks.
    “I am sure Angela will pick up without a blip.”
    “She’s very good and she’s hungry, but she doesn’t have the chops. Not yet, at least, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? The newspaper is supposed to be the community’s watchdog and we’re turning it over to the puppies. Think of all the great journalism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The corruption exposed, the public benefit. Where’s that going to come from now with every paper in the country getting shredded? Our government? No way. TV, the blogs? Forget it. My friend who took the buyout in Florida says corruption will be the new growth industry without the papers watching.”
    She paused as if to ponder the sad state of things.
    “Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m just depressed. Angela is great. She’ll do good work and in three or four years she’ll own that beat the way you own it now. But the point is, between now and then, how many stories will she miss? And how many of them would have never gotten by you?”
    I only shrugged. These were questions that mattered to her but no longer to me. In twelve days I was out.
    “Well,” she said after a delayed silence. “I’m sorry. I’ve always enjoyed working with you.”
    “Well, I still have some time. Maybe I’ll find something really good to go out on.”
    She smiled brightly.
    “That would be great!”
    “Anything happening today that you know of?”
    “Nothing big,” Dorothy said. “I saw on the overnote that the police chief is meeting with black leaders to talk about racially targeted crime again. But we’ve done that to death.”
    “I’m going to take Angela around Parker Center and I’ll see if we can come up with something.”
    “Good.”
    A few minutes later Angela Cook and I refilled coffee cups and took a table in the cafeteria. It was on the first floor in the space where the old presses had turned for so many decades before they started printing the paper offsite. The conversation with Angela was stiff. I had met her briefly six months earlier when she was a new hire and Fowler had trotted her around the cubicles, making introductions. But since then I hadn’t worked on a story with her, had lunch or coffee with her, or seen her at one of the watering holes favored by the older denizens of the newsroom.
    “Where’d you come from, Angela?”
    “Tampa. I went to the University of Florida.”
    “Good school. Journalism?”
    “I got my master’s there, yeah.”
    “Have you done any cop shop reporting?”
    “Before I went back for my master’s I worked two years in St. Pete.