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innovating out of their systems early, after which the ideas they came up with when they were bold enough to pop monocles and crack corset stays assume the more depressing qualities of poured concrete. In Mr. Hearst’s case they were as old as his feud with the late Joseph Pulitzer and the war they had invented with Spain in 1898. Worse, he was a teetotaler. It did little for my journalistic pride to beat the News’s goddamn auto-giro to the scene of some riverfront bloodbath only to see my account sandwiched between a gushing review of Marion Davies’s latest costume epic and an editorial in favor of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. After three years at the same stand the soles of my feet were starting to crawl.
    I was neglecting the free lunch at the House of All Nations for the butcher job a night editor had done on a piece of mine when a compact towhead in a neat gray double-breasted hung his overcoat and hat on the hook next to mine. It was January 1930, the room was overheated, and I could feel the cold wafting off the navy cashmere. He was smiling down at me when I glanced up from the newspaper.
    “Connie Minor, isn’t it?”
    I looked quickly at his hands. He wasn’t holding any papers, so I said it was Connie Minor all right.
    “I’m Howard Wolfman.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No,” he said simply. “They told me at the Times you’d be here. Is it all right if I sit down?”
    I flicked a hand toward the seat facing mine. It wasn’t the trick name that threw me; I’d heard of Howard Wolfman. If I’d been expecting him I would have been looking for sweaty armpits, a beer gut, and gin on his breath. Someday maybe I’ll learn not to write the story until I’ve met its subject. The man who sat down opposite me in the booth was a natty little albino with thin white hair combed down on his forehead and pink eyes like a rabbit’s behind gold-rimmed glasses. I folded the newspaper and laid it aside.
    “The Times told you where to find me?”
    “I didn’t exactly tell them who I was.” He inclined his head toward the paper. “Good story on the Windsor Tunnel.”
    “It was before they got to it.”
    He caught the bartender’s eye and made a circle with his forefinger. Two fresh beers were brought. Wolfman turned down the lunch. “Are you familiar with the Banner?”
    “The stands are always out.”
    He turned, slid a rolled newspaper from the pocket of his dangling overcoat, and spread it out on the table facing me.
    It was half the size of the broadsheet Times and printed on coarse gray pulp; I could feel the ends of the fibers when I turned the pages. The masthead, a simple block with no Old English flourishes, read The Detroit Banner. A grainy shot of two men lying on their faces on a splotched sidewalk filled the midget front page under the screamer:
    BOWLES: “LET THEM DIE!”
    Inside was an account of the mayor’s press conference explaining his policy of noninvolvement concerning gang killings, side by side with a story about two unidentified men gunned down last night on the East Side.
    “Nice,” I said. “Only he didn’t say, ‘Let them die.’ I was there.”
    “It made a better headline. What do you think of the picture?”
    “It’s okay. I didn’t know any were taken.”
    “There weren’t. My photo editor dressed two linotypists in hats and overcoats and had them lie down. What looks like blood is really just an oilstain.”
    “That’s unethical,” I said automatically.
    He waggled a hand. “We wouldn’t have done it if we’d been able to get a picture of the real thing. The timing was too good to let go. And we didn’t actually say the picture is of the two men who were killed.”
    “I guess it sells papers.” I was trying to imagine the Times’s photo editor showing that kind of initiative.
    “Better than that. There’s talk of a recall. The Banner can claim most of the credit.”
    “Jerry Buckley might not agree. He’s been on Bowles’s ass for