Naked Ambition by Rick Pullen

Author:Rick Pullen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63393-723-9
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2015-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

36

Beck sat in a large glass-walled conference room off the newsroom with two newspaper lawyers and his editor Nancy Moore. This was the part of writing a big story he hated. They were going over the final draft—line by line—looking for any potential legal problems. He spent half of last night pacing his living room talking to Red and polishing this version. He was exhausted, and he didn’t want to justify himself to a couple of legal nitpickers.

Beck looked at the big gun, Charles Curtiss, a rotund former law professor with a bald white fringe and walrus mustache. He was like all lawyers, Beck felt. He arrogantly hurled his legal knowledge in public to command attention with civilians who weren’t members of the jurisprudence brotherhood. Beck conceded Curtiss knew his First Amendment stuff, but in his mind that still didn’t warrant the fat man’s smugness.

Curtiss had been the newspaper’s attorney for thirty-five years. He sauntered among the elite in the command structure at the Post-Examiner and shared his box seats at Redskins games with Publisher Kather-ine Cunningham, Baker, and other members of the newspaper’s executive team. There was a definite pecking order at the paper, and despite the fame and awards he had brought the Post-Examiner, Beck realized he would never upgrade to platinum status. He was just unwilling to play the suck-up game. He thought his work would speak for itself. But the Post-Examiner, he realized, was no different than the rest of Washington.

Beck glanced over at Roby Hedelt, who sat next to Curtiss. Usually, story read-throughs were left to Roby, an openly gay, forty-something

attorney employed full time by the paper. She not only handled any day-to-day legal issues, but some libel work as well. Beck liked her, and often felt disappointed that such a taunt, striking woman was gay. God, if she weren’t, he’d have asked her out years ago. But with his win-loss record in relationships, maybe it was just as well.

He would have preferred to deal with Roby, but the political impact of his story seemed so high Cunningham had asked Curtiss to sit in on the story meeting, and Roby deferred to him.

“You did good work,” Curtiss said. “No malice that I can see. There’s not a chance in hell they can sue us for libel and win. But I’m disturbed none of your targets would comment. All I see is ‘no comment’ throughout this piece. Not Lamurr, not Senator Bayard, not even Jackson Oliver. You couldn’t get any of them on the record?”

“Would you comment to a reporter when you were about to be hung out to dry?” Beck answered.

“Now we’ll have none of that kind of talk outside of this room. Not even to your colleagues in the office here. Understood?”

“I get it,” Beck said, angry at himself for being too candid in front of the newspaper’s judicial nanny.

“I can vouch for Beck,” Nancy said. “He’s played the game before. A little frankness behind closed doors among friends to assure we all know where we stand is not inappropriate in my book.

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