A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series) by Andrew Case

Author:Andrew Case [Case, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503938922
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2017-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“I don’t know, Len. I’ve got a clean statement from the DCPI on this. I’m not sure I want to muddy the relationship.”

Tony Licata leaned back in his swivel chair. Leonard waited for him to tilt forward. What he had to say, he wanted to say up close. Licata almost lost his balance, then swung forward to catch himself. Leonard, planted in a folding chair, now had his face inches away from his old friend’s.

“There is more to this one than the DCPI is letting on, Tony.” The Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, the NYPD’s chief spokesman, was famous for doling out just enough information at just the right times to keep the daily print reporters totally dependent on him. He was famous for being vindictive, too. Use a source that wasn’t approved, and you’d get a call that one of the dogs from the Westminster Kennel Club show had been electrocuted by a live manhole cover on Rector Street. Just to make you run downtown and wander around a construction site looking for a dead animal that didn’t exist. Report too aggressively on a police shooting, and you would be locked out of the room when the officers give a press conference celebrating their inevitable acquittal.

The press needed the DCPI to give it the daily river of blood, fires, and betrayal that made up the bulk of a tabloid paper. But get too close, try too hard to get the story underneath, and the DCPI would turn on you in a heartbeat. It was like an abusive marriage, and the tabloid guys were every day on the wrong end of it.

Tony Licata closed his eyes. Leonard was sitting across from him in the tiny sheet-rock office the Daily News got to use inside One Police Plaza. One of a dozen identical cubes connected by a hallway so narrow you couldn’t squeeze two people past each other in it. The Shack, they called it—a tiny warren where each paper and a couple of radio stations got a desk, a computer, and a phone in thirty-six square feet. So that they could already be in the building when the DCPI wanted to give an announcement on the thirteenth floor. Or so they could be close to a subway to the outer boroughs if there was new mayhem to report.

But the NYPD wasn’t so generous as to give reporters easy access just for kicks. Housing all the police reporters essentially in one room together was a good way to keep tabs on them. The department could make sure that no detective could come tip them off. There was a good reason that, even though the department gave each office in the Shack a dedicated phone line, all the reporters made all of their calls on their cell phones.

Leonard didn’t have to worry about being seen walking into the Shack. When he had worked at DIMAC, he had been in here every week, dropping a story to Tony at the Daily News

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