From the novel Lady In the Lake by Laura Lippman: The novel is set in Baltimore and many of the chapters are written in the first-person by a character in the story. This excerpt is by newspaper columnist Bob Bauer.
I am a columnist. I don’t have to break stories, worry about getting beat. I don’t really do that much news anymore. It’s supposed to be a badge of honor, reaching the point where you’re above the fray, allowed to pontificate, or just write these little sketches about your own life. That’s my gig, most of the time. . . .
Then, sometimes, I get to thinking I need to horn in on a story. H. L. Mencken didn’t get his own room at the Pratt library by writing funny stories about his wife. If you’re a Baltimore reporter, Mencken’s the standard-bearer. Mencken, Jim Bready, maybe Russell Baker, although I remember when he started on night cops and he was no great shakes. . . .
Anyway, I was chatting up Diller, our nighttime cop reporter, been on the job so long that he’s more cop than reporter. About as incurious a guy as I’ve ever known. There are more of those types in newspapers than you might think. If you could teach a dog to put on a fedora and carry a notepad, he would do the job the way Diller does, barking out facts to night rewrite. Girl, dead. Found alongside Clyburn Avenue. No arrests at this time. Sources confirm it’s Tessie Fine. But sometimes Diller knows stuff without knowing what he knows and he’s the one who described to me the two women at the scene. I still have enough sources down at the cop shop that I was able to unearth the one’s name. . . .
My scoop is a sensation. I knew it would be. All the other papers have to chase it. The young cop reporters, even the ones on my own paper, are pissed. (Except for Diller, whose only concern is figuring out my source.) Who am I to be poaching one of the biggest stories out of the cop shop? I’ll tell you who I am. I’m Bob Bauer. I served in World War II, came home and married my high school sweetheart, started at the bottom and wrote my way to the top. I can do anything—features, hard news, political analysis. I’m the two-thousand-pound gorilla who sits wherever I want. In the newsroom, the day my story runs, I sit at my desk in the corner of the Sunday office and the other reporters come by to pay homage, congratulate me, ask me how it did it. I cock a finger at them and smile. “Trade secret, men. Trade secret.”
No one asks me out after work. I’m not sure I could have gone if they had. But it would have been nice if someone had asked. I stopped going out with the guys a long time ago and they stopped asking.
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