Murder at the Washington Tribune - Margaret Truman [26]
“Did you get their names?”
He fished two business cards from his shirt pocket and handed them to Wilcox, who recognized the detectives’ names.
“I’d like one of these pictures, Philip.”
“You would? Why?”
“Let me be candid with you. We’ll be running a story about Colleen’s murder—in the Tribune—and I’d hate to have to use some inferior photograph from her personnel file. It probably wasn’t any better than pictures on driver’s licenses and passports.”
“It wasn’t very good,” he said.
“I’m sure it wasn’t. I think she deserves to have a better picture used, like one of these great shots you took of her. It’s only fair. It’s only right. I’m sure you agree. You obviously took these pictures with love. It shows.”
He thought the young man would cry again, but he didn’t. “Sure, go ahead and take one,” he said.
“I like this one,” Wilcox said, carefully removing the photo from the first page. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “She’s beautiful.”
Wilcox stood and extended his hand. “I’d better be going,” he said. “You’ve been very generous with your time, Philip, and I don’t want to wear out my welcome. May I call you again if I have further questions?”
“That’ll be okay. Do you have any idea when we’ll be able to have a funeral for Colleen? Her mom and sister keep asking about that.”
“It’ll be a while, I’m afraid,” Wilcox replied. “When a death is the result of a homicide, the police need to keep the body for a period of time. Here’s my card, Philip. Call any time. I’d like to help.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that, Mr. Wilcox.”
“And please express my condolences to Colleen’s mother and sister and other family members. I may try and talk with them in a day or two, once the shock is past.”
Wilcox went to his car and dropped down into the driver’s seat. While talking with Connor, he’d suffered the same mild lightheadedness and vague nausea he’d experienced when interviewing Jean Kaporis’s roommate, Mary Jane Pruit. He rested his head against the seat’s back and closed his eyes until the feeling passed, and spent the next few minutes making descriptive notes about the apartment to use in the article.
He knew he’d taken advantage of Connor’s vulnerability. The young man was obviously a naÏf, his lack of worldliness evident. There had been instances in Wilcox’s journalistic career when he’d backed off in deference to the grieving, and had paid the price for that sensitivity by losing some of the emotionally charged aspects of those stories. But he’d operated under his own set of values, and hadn’t regretted it.
• • •
Tabloid journalism had always been anathema to him, and he’d promised himself that if he couldn’t work for a mainstream paper, a newspaper respected for its integrity, he’d find another line of work. He’d held true to that pledge. The problem was, he felt, journalism had violated his principles.
He’d seen it happen at the Tribune. As circulation dropped off, along with advertising revenues, standards had slipped, too. The almighty bottom line became increasingly powerful; the choice of stories, and the way they were treated, mirrored what had become an almost insatiable drive to return profits to the paper’s shareholders. Yes, The Washington Tribune had retained respectability through its coverage of national and world events, particularly politics. The Trib, along with The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Cleveland Plain Dealer, his former employer, the Detroit Free Press, and others, had managed to avoid all but a trace of overt capitulation to base public tastes, which seemed to prefer daily doses of dirt from the celebrity murder trial du jour, the sexual escapades of elected officials, and titillating tales of show-business debauchery.
But his level of disdain for tabloid journalism had slowly but surely begun to evaporate—or wasn’t there to begin with—along with Underwood typewriters, green eyeshades, and gruff, hard-nosed reporters yelling,