Murder at the Washington Tribune - Margaret Truman [5]
Wilcox grunted and dug into his apple pie. The topic didn’t come up again until they had split the bill and were standing on the sidewalk.
“Sure you don’t at least want to explore the Trib thing?” Melito asked. “I can give somebody a call.”
“No, I.… Sure, Tommy, call somebody. It’s not for me. But it’d be interesting to see what golden opportunity I’m passing up.”
• • •
Wilcox spent the afternoon interviewing two witnesses to a shooting at a downtown public housing complex and filed his story before leaving the office. He’d had trouble pushing aside the conversation with Melito, and thought of little else as he drove to the house he’d called home for the past couple of years. He decided not to even mention it to Georgia. No sense upsetting her with thoughts of another move. The Detroit Free Press was his third job since graduating from Northwestern seven years ago with a degree in journalism and marrying his college sweetheart. She’d been a good soldier about it, encouraging him as he moved from a weekly paper to a daily, and then to the larger daily where he now worked, each move advancing his career and bettering his salary. But he knew she considered the Free Press the culmination of that career, a major daily in a large city, with room for advancement. For her, this was the big time, and he sometimes agreed with her.
Still, there were those youthful visions of one day becoming, say, a foreign correspondent, trench coat and all, his generation’s Edward R. Murrow, meeting with shadowy figures in exotic foreign cities while bombs burst around you, scooping others who were after the same story, front-page bylines on a paper like The New York Times or The Washington Tribune and the resulting notoriety, including prizes—a Pulitzer for little Joey Wilcox from Kankakee? Maybe he’d start smoking a pipe.
A pipe dream, he knew, like envisioning himself hitting the home run that would lead his favorite baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, into the World Series—finally! He was a beat reporter, covering the city of Detroit the way Hamill and Breslin did in New York, and Kupcinet did in Chicago. A foreign correspondent? You’ve been watching too many movies, he told himself. Be happy with who you are and what you’ve got.
He eagerly took Melito’s call the next day.
“Hey, Joe, just wanted you to know that I got through to my guy in D.C.”
“And?”
“Talked to Paul Morehouse. He’s assistant managing editor of the Metro section, part of the new regime, a no-nonsense guy but okay. Rough cob. Came over from The Baltimore Sun. I told him all about you, in glowing terms, of course, and he said he’d be interested in getting a call.”
“I really appreciate it, Tom, but—”
Melito rattled off Morehouse’s phone number. “Got it?”
“No, give it to me again.”
This time, Wilcox wrote it down.
“It’s his private line. Call him.” Melito said. “You’ve got nothing to lose, maybe lots to gain.”
Wilcox left the paper that afternoon to make the call from a gas station phone booth. Morehouse answered. He sounded gruff and distracted and squeezed a series of rapid-fire questions into a few minutes. When it was obvious to Wilcox that the conversation was about to end, Morehouse asked, “You as good as Tommy Melito says?”
“I don’t know,” Wilcox replied. “What did he say?”
“Send me a resume and some clips. If I like what I see, I’ll pass it on to Human Resources.” He laughed, a bark. “Christ, it used to be Personnel. I’ll get back to you.”
Wilcox decided to follow through on Morehouse’s request without informing Georgia. He’d come to the conclusion that it was a wasted exercise; nothing would come of it. Five days after sending the material by priority mail, he received a call at the Free Press from Morehouse. “Can you talk?” the editor asked.
Wilcox looked around the newsroom. “No,” he said.
“Call me back.”
That night, after dinner had been cleared and Roberta was in her room, Wilcox told his wife of his flirtation with The Washington Tribune.
“They want you to go to Washington for an interview?