“She’s gone,” Amanda said. “The girl. She just vanished.”
“THIS REALLY HAPPENED?” Tom Gilbert asked, coming to perch his skinny butt on the corner of Jim’s desk. Tom was to the City Desk what lunch ladies were to playground bullies—ineffective and overzealous. In a word, useless.
“Of course it happened,” Jim said, not looking up from his five hundred words about Carter O’Neill’s testimony for his mother ten years ago.
He’d already handed in his story about Carter O’Neill’s love child.
Honestly, this might be one of the best days of Jim’s life.
“Jim?”
“You’ve got a picture,” Jim said, rolling away from the keyboard to face his boss. “It happened. I’ve got two old ladies saying they had no idea Zoe Madison was having a thing with the mayor pro tem. What more do you want?”
“News,” Tom said, smacking the copy against his knee.
“Carter O’Neill, who is going to announce his candidacy for mayor any minute, knocks a girl up and walks away?” Jim laughed. “That’s not news?”
“I don’t think it’s true,” Tom said and Jim sat up.
“You accusing me of lying?”
“No, Jim,” Tom sighed. “Christ, you’re so defensive I can barely talk to you. What I’m saying is I don’t think it’s a story. The Mayor Pro Tem office is going to issue a statement saying O’Neill’s never even heard of this girl, and I don’t want to have to print a retraction in two days for a story tomorrow.”
“That might not happen, Tom.” You lily-livered, soft-handed coward, he thought. “And right now, you’ve got a public official involved in some pretty crummy stuff. I know it’s been awhile since you were out there, but that is news. The girl’s broke—a dance teacher or something—she has no insurance, and she just accused Golden Boy Carter O’Neill of knocking her up. It’s gonna be all over the region, it’s so good.”
Tom stood up, his freaking king-of-the-world attitude putting a few more inches on his lollipop build. “Your hard-on for this guy is getting in the way of your judgment. You did good work two years ago on the Marcuzzi administration. No one can take that away from you—”
Especially you, you little nosebleed, Jim thought.
“But not every public official is out to ruin this town.”
“Carter O’Neill’s father was arrested with a thirty-carat stolen gem! His sister is dating the son of the man arrested for the original theft. The man comes from a family of crooks. His grandmother was a high-paid whore—”
Tom winced, because he had the stomach of a little girl.
“His mother is a known criminal—”
“Convicted once of grand theft auto.” Tom shook his head. “You did this story when Richard Bonavie was originally arrested and Carter answered every one of your questions. He has very little contact with his family. Not everyone running this town is dirty. I think the Marcuzzi administration ruined you, made you see crooks were there aren’t any.”
“Gem theft!” Jim cried. “If Carter has anything to do with it, he’s dirtier than Marcuzzi.”
“I’m not against you,” Tom whispered. “I want to help you. But you’re young and fairly new to the city—you keep running around here half-cocked and we’re all gonna get burned. There’s a difference between journalism and a witch hunt.”
“What about the love child story?” Jim asked, ignoring Tom’s little pep talk.
Tom sighed. “It runs. Copy already came up with a killer headline,” he said and Jim fought back a smile. Of course it would run. It was top-shelf scandal, and scandal sold papers.
“What else are you working on?” Tom asked.
“I’ve got five hundred words on O’Neill testifying for his mother in a criminal case ten years ago.”
“Are you kidding?” Tom asked. “You’re turning into a one-trick pony here, Jim.”
“You’ve got a hole on page three,” he said with a shrug. “I can fill it.”
“Damn,” Tom sighed. “Okay, Jim, but let’s remember what we’re here to do. Tell news, not stories.”
CARTER DIDN’T WAIT for the emergency Saturday-morning meeting to officially begin. He stormed into Amanda’s office and caught her shoving the last of a doughnut into her mouth.
“What are we going to do?” he asked.
“Knock?” she asked, around a mouthful. “Learn some manners?”
He sighed and slapped the Gazette on her desk. The picture of the pregnant elf on that chair stared up at him, mocking him. Jim Blackwell had found out the woman’s name—Zoe Madison. It was right there in the caption, and Carter had spent most of the morning finding out what he could about her.
Her address on a scrap of paper burned in his pocket, and he wanted nothing more than to go over to Beauregard Town and strangle her. Of course, that wouldn’t do much for his image. Maybe he’d be better off parading her around town and making her tell every single person they met that she’d lied about him.
“He’s calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” Carter said through gritted teeth.
“Actually,” Amanda said, swallowing and standing, as she gathered a stack of papers in her arms, “so are the Houston Chronicle, and the New Orleans Sentinel and—” She tossed the papers on the desk, each one hitting the mahogany with a flat thud like a nail in Carter O’Neill’s coffin. “The real kicker, the pièce de résistance, if you will—”
“Amanda. We don’t need any more theater.”
“Third page in USA Today. They’re all calling you Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.”
He hissed as if burned. And it felt that way; his anger was so hot he had to stand up and walk to the window, looking down on St. Louis Street, quiet and slick with rain.
This was going to be his legacy. He could clean up every neighborhood in this city, but he’d still go to his grave as Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.
He was, at this point, the opposite of Bill Higgins.
Bill Higgins, who came out of retirement last year after the previous administration was finally exposed in its corruption, and who was reelected Mayor-President. It was a quirk of Baton Rouge politics that the Mayor of Baton Rouge was also the President of the Western Baton Rouge Parish, but it hardly mattered. Bill Higgins was king in this city. Hell, in this state.
And Carter wanted to align himself with such a man.
He needed to, if he had any hope of becoming mayor in eighteen months.
But he should have known better. He was an O’Neill, after all—scandal
