Ethics are lost, and a fresh bar tab is opened.
Ethics were never a bother to me before – not in college, not as an intern. There was always a healthy distance between me, my sources, and the story I was charged with writing.
There were always people around me – smart people, people with world views like mine, who enjoyed discussing the issues of the day with a certain level of disconnect, what some may call arrogance.
Arrogance because we knew whatever peril our sources found themselves in, it wasn’t ours. Arrogance because people like us, we believed, were too smart, too sophisticated, too worldly to have the same issues as these people we covered.
No, we were the ones going from the college newsroom to The New York Times.
We stood alongside the bar each evening, ties loosened, sipping a beer or something more complicated, and talked of our days as if they had happened to other people, at an arm’s length. Then, with disdain, we’d throw a $20 on the bar and leave, heading back into the world that we knew, one day, we’d own.
In Middle Valley, it seems, there is no tolerance for such an attitude, no one to stand at the bar and talk shop to – certainly no one I should stand at the bar and talk shop to … for reasons of objectivity and maintaining professional decorum.
But I digress.
No, here I am branded as one of three things – a) the childish lackey at the paper its editors farmed out to cover this muddy, murderous village every day that they really truly didn’t want around, b) the Ivy League snot nose that sends resumes and counts the days ‘til his Tour of Duty is over, or c) Bernie’s puppet.
In essence, it came as no surprise that I’ve spent the past four weeks trying to sit down with Cassie and hear more about the Mick situation. She finally agreed under one condition: That I pay my outstanding bar bill.
Having drained my bank account, we sat in the back of the Riverside, where the punchcards and time clock lived. She’d never upgraded the system, she said, because no one she hired is computer-literate.
She did not mince words.
“Mick was an asshole.”
“Is that on the record?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. I’m having enough trouble keeping the slimy media leaches out of my hair, no need to give them a sound bite. In fact, can you put that away?”
She pointed at the recorder and notebook on the table.
“Sure.” I did as I was asked and she nodded in appreciation.
“Thank you … I’ll tell you everything if you agree to let me help you tell the story.”
Having left my own impartiality in her cash register at this point, and figuring I’d want to come back in here once I got paid, I agreed.
She related their entire experience together, how he’d left her, then how he’d just shown up on the stoop at the Riverside, how he’d gotten in “a little deep.”
It came out of her like a flood.
Now I’m a person who had perfect SAT scores, better than 4.0 GPA, and brain cells to burn, but even my relatively perfect brain wasn’t grasping this whole thing.
I had to ask. “So you’re telling me that the money that bought this bar came from something criminal … and you’re thinking that may have something to do with his … murder, or whatever they are calling it?”
Cassie inhaled, then nodded.
“Someone was after him, someone who knew where to find him, someone who – for all I know – could have been in this bar, MY bar – and decided to kill him.”
I tried to control my emotions – on one hand, thinking like a journalist and piecing together a story … on the other, feeling so engulfed by her revelations that the idea of actually reporting on this was daunting.
“Who knows about all of this?” I asked. “Who have you told?”
“No one. I mean, people know that I was married and that it ended abruptly … but I never really elaborated on the person ….”
Suddenly, the journalist/competitor in me snapped to attention.
Susan didn’t have this. New York didn’t have this. The tabloids didn’t have this.
“Let’s keep it that way,” I said to her. “And let’s start a new tab, if you don’t mind?”