“Is there anything else you need to tell me?” he asks.
“You’re not in danger, so long as you don’t show anybody those papers.”
He nods slowly but doesn’t speak for a few seconds. Then he says, “You weren’t kidding about the Pulitzer, were you?”
“No. But when I won mine, it was mostly for getting shot at.”
Ben smiles. “I hope there’s an easier way. Just let me know if I need to start carrying.”
Before I can ask whether he owns a gun, Ben heads for the newsroom. Since he’s left me alone, I decide to call Jet from his office, where there’s little chance that Paul could walk in on me, should he decide to come back.
“What happened?” Jet asks as I close Ben’s door.
“He bought it. I felt so damned low lying to him. Paul’s in bad shape, Jet.”
She sighs like someone who just dodged a runaway bus. “And Buckman? Did you reach him?”
“No. That deal’s off the table.”
“What? Why?”
“Arthur Pine called me. They know about Max’s video. They must have hauled him into the bank and demanded he give them anything he might have on me.”
She’s silent for several seconds. “That’s not the choice I’d have expected Buckman to make. He’s relying solely on that video to keep you from publishing the cache? I figured he’d get the cache from you, then try to welsh on whatever promises he could.”
“Jet, that video will keep me quiet. Paul is clinging to sanity by his fingernails. I just lied to his face after he begged me not to. Max and the Poker Club own us now.”
“Maybe not.”
“What?”
“They don’t have the video themselves. Max would never give it to them. He might tell them about it, but he’s too smart to give them that power. If he did, they wouldn’t need him anymore.”
She’s probably right about that. “So we’re safe for the time being? Look, I have no idea what our next move is.”
“I do.”
Ben Tate walks back into his office and motions for me to keep talking. Then he writes six words on the notepad on his desk: Arthur Pine is in your office.
“Tell him I’ll be right there,” I say.
“What?” Jet asks.
Ben disappears.
“Arthur Pine is apparently waiting in my office.”
“That can’t be good.”
“I can handle Arthur. What did you mean? What are you planning to do?”
“I’m going to get that goddamn sex video from Max. I’m not going through another spousal interrogation like that.”
“You might get his cell phone, but you won’t know if you have all copies.”
“Maybe not, but if those passwords from Sally’s necklace open his phone, I’ll be flipping the script on him. We’ll own Max for a change. How does that sound?”
“Be careful, Jet.”
“Remember who you’re talking to. P.S., I love you.”
“You, too,” I say, but the words are automatic. The desperation I felt when Paul hugged me is too fresh to feel clean about intimacy with his wife.
When I walk back through my office door, I find Arthur Pine waiting in his five-thousand-dollar suit. Unctuous on his best day, Arthur stands smirking before me with his golfer’s tan and perfectly coiffed gray hair.
“Looks pretty busy around here,” he says. “I’m surprised.”
“We’re working some big stories, if you haven’t heard. What do you want, Arthur? You here to threaten me not to run any more photos of your poker pals?”
He gives me a patronizing smile. “No, I’m here to inform you that you won’t be printing any more stories of any kind.”
“What are you talking about?”
The lawyer opens his coat and removes a sheaf of papers covered with tiny type. “I’ve come to shut down the Watchman.”
Chapter 34
I decide to take the back way from the paper to my parents’ house—Cemetery Road. I haven’t yet called my mother, and I wish there were some way to avoid it. The news of what happened to the Bienville Watchman over the past half hour could quite literally kill my father. It’s probably already broken on Twitter and Instagram, as the kids from our newsroom attempt to deal with the shock of their unexpected terminations. If the news has hit Facebook, even my mother might see it before I reach their house.
As I leave the old grid of downtown streets, heading east, I think back to the pitiful scene that unfolded before I left the Watchman for the last time. Standing gobsmacked in my office door, I asked Arthur Pine what he was holding.
“A debt-purchase agreement,” he told me. “Marty Denis is an old friend of your father’s, I think?”
“Marty Denis?” I said, recalling only that he took my parents some crawfish tails yesterday. “The president of First Farmers Bank?”
“The very man. Marty’s been carrying the paper on your father’s various loans for a number of years—at considerable risk to himself, I must say. He imperiled his position at the bank. But all that’s been resolved now. As of an hour ago, Mr. Denis sold all those loans to Bienville Southern.”
Claude Buckman’s bank. I wanted to tell Pine I didn’t believe him, but he wouldn’t have been in my office if his mission weren’t a fait accompli.
“We have the right to demand full payment at any time,” he went on, “and we’re calling the notes today, in full. If you can’t pay, we’re foreclosing on the property and all physical plant of the Bienville Watchman as of five p.m.”
“What’s the total amount?” I asked, barely able to summon my voice.
“Just under five-point-five million dollars.”
I probably wavered on my feet. “That’s impossible.”
“Talk to your father. You’ll find that it’s not only possible, but the state of his balance sheet as of yesterday.”
I had some idea of the company’s debt, but when I used what I knew to express skepticism, Pine quickly disabused me of my illusions. He could do that because my father had kept his longtime “business manager” on the payroll to act as a buffer between me and the true nightmare of our situation.
“Beyond what I’ve told you, the company pension plan is underfunded,” Pine informed me. “You’re even in trouble with the state, over payroll taxes. By the way, we’re going to allow your parents to keep their house, which is heavily mortgaged, if and only if after severance from this newspaper, you cease all criticism of the Poker Club or any ancillary business ventures.”
I walked past the lawyer and stood beside my desk like a dog returning to a house where it had once lived. How is it that the worst moments of our lives happen without warning? Only hours earlier the Poker Club had offered me the moon. In response, I nearly sold out everything I’d ever stood for. Now, thanks to a video of me having sex with a married woman, my deal with the devil would not be consummated. And years of financial negligence by my father would allow the Poker Club to destroy the work of seven generations of my family.
While Pine watched with ill-concealed pleasure, I took a sip of coffee from the Styrofoam cup beside my laptop. It had gone cold hours ago. “You’re a parasite, Arthur,” I told him. “You make ambulance-chasing look like an honest living.”