Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

Author:Laura Lippman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

The Cop Reporter

The Cop Reporter

I know what my coworkers say behind my back. They call me Deputy Dawg. They say I’ve gone native, that I’m more cop than reporter. That I can’t write my way out of a paper bag, which is why I’m still on the cop beat after thirty years. No one serious about his newspaper career stays on the cop beat. Look at this little filly, thinking she’s going to make a career writing about some dead Negro. She doesn’t get it. Even at the Star, which doesn’t try to be like the fancy-pants Beacon, with its foreign bureaus and eight-man staff in DC, the cop beat is supposed to be a way station, a place you pass through.

A fifty-two-year-old cop reporter is unusual. To my face, the other cop reporters call me the “dean.” They pretend to look up to me. They try to steal my sources, certain they can do better by them. But I have these sources because I’m not going anywhere. These young guys would betray someone in a flash. I socialize with the men on my beat. I go to their kids’ christenings, attend the occasional FOP bull roast, buy rounds at the bar the cops favor.

I’m happy at HQ. My stomach drops to my ankles when I have to show up at the newsroom, unless it’s to pick up my paycheck or cash out my expenses. Those are the only good reasons to walk into the Star.

My father was a newspaperman in Philadelphia, a columnist, a legend. Jonny Diller. He was Jonathan, I’m John, a mistake on the birth certificate that stuck, so I’m no junior and I don’t let anyone call me Johnny. Of course I wanted to do what my old man did. It looked fun. People acted as if he was special because his name was on the front page of the paper on a regular basis. I ended up at the Star because I went to Hopkins, edited the News-Letter. I always imagined I’d make the hundred-mile journey back home someday, maybe as a columnist or a political writer.

There was only one problem: I couldn’t write. I mean, yes, I can put sentences together in the right order, but I lost any flair I once had. I don’t know how to explain it. The way they structure things at newspapers is that you don’t write at first. You go to a crime scene, you find a pay phone, you call the facts in to rewrite. In an afternoon paper, there’s no time to get back to the office and file. You know where every pay phone in the city is, that’s your desk.

When I caught my first murder, my third day of work, I laboriously wrote the story in my notebook, thinking I would dictate it to the rewrite guy, saving him the work. He chewed me out. I wasn’t saving him time, I was wasting time because what I had written was no good. “This is what I need and this is the order I need it in,” he barked at me.

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