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Tom stood up, his freaking king-of-the-world attitude putting a few more inches on his lollipop build. He really did have a big head. “Your hard-on for this guy is getting in the way of your judgment. You did good work two years ago on the Marcuzzi administration. No one can take that away from you—”
Especially you, you little nosebleed, I thought.
“But not every public official is out to ruin this town.”
“Carter O’Neill’s father was arrested with a thirty-carat stolen gem! His sister is dating the son of the man arrested for the original theft. The man comes from a family of crooks. His grandmother was a high-paid whore—”
Tom winced, because he had the stomach of a little girl.
“His mother is a known criminal—”
“Convicted once of grand theft auto.” Tom shook his head. “You did this story when Richard Bonavie was originally arrested and Carter answered every one of your questions. He has very little contact with his family. Not everyone running this town is dirty. I think the Marcuzzi administration ruined you, made you see crooks where there aren’t any.”
“Gem theft!” I cried. “If Carter has anything to do with it, he’s dirtier than Marcuzzi.”
“I’m not against you,” Tom whispered. “I want to help you. But you’re young and fairly new to the city—you keep running around here half-cocked and we’re all gonna get burned. There’s a difference between journalism and a witch hunt.”
“What about the love child story?” I asked, ignoring Tom’s little pep talk.
Tom sighed. “It runs. Copy already came up with a killer headline,” he said and I fought back a smile. Of course it would run. It was top-shelf scandal, and scandal sold papers.
“What else are you working on?” Tom asked.
“I’ve got five hundred words on O’Neill testifying for his mother in a criminal case ten years ago.”
“Are you kidding?” Tom asked. “You’re turning into a one-trick pony here, Jim.”
“You’ve got a hole on page three,” I said with a shrug. “I can fill it.”
“Damn,” Tom sighed. “Okay, Jim, but let’s remember what we’re here to do. Tell news, not stories.”
CARTER
I didn’t wait for the emergency Saturday-morning meeting to officially begin. I stormed into Amanda’s office and caught her shoving the last of a doughnut into her mouth.
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“Knock?” she asked, around a mouthful. “Learn some manners?”
I sighed and slapped the Gazette on her desk. The picture of the pregnant elf on that chair stared up at me, mocking me. Jim Blackwell had found out the woman’s name—Zoe Madison. It was right there in the caption, and I had spent most of the morning finding out what I could about her.
Her address on a scrap of paper burned in my pocket, and I wanted nothing more than to go over to Beauregard Town and strangle her. Of course, that wouldn’t do much for my image. Maybe I’d be better off parading her around town and making her tell every single person we met that she’d lied about me.
“He’s calling me Deputy Deadbeat Daddy,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Actually,” Amanda said, swallowing and standing, as she gathered a stack of papers in her arms, “so are the Houston Chronicle, and the New Orleans Sentinel and—” She tossed the papers on the desk, each one hitting the mahogany with a flat thud like a nail in my coffin. “The real kicker, the pièce de résistance, if you will—”
“Amanda. We don’t need any more theater.”
“Third page in USA Today. They’re all calling you Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.”
I hissed as if burned. And it felt that way; my anger was so hot I had to stand up and walk to the window, looking down on St. Louis Street, quiet and slick with rain.
This was going to be my legacy. I could clean up every neighborhood in this city, but I’d still go to my grave as Deputy Deadbeat Daddy.
I was, at this point, the opposite of Bill Higgins.
Bill Higgins, who came out of retirement last year after the previous administration was finally exposed in its corruption, and who was reelected Mayor-President. It was a quirk of Baton Rouge politics that the Mayor of Baton Rouge was also the President of the Western Baton Rouge Parish, but it hardly mattered. Bill Higgins was king in this city. Hell, in this state.
And I wanted to align myself with such a man.
I needed to, if I had any hope of becoming mayor in eighteen months.
But I should have known better. I was an O’Neill, after all—scandal was practically my middle name. I thought that I could keep the dirty part of my life away from the clean part.
“How do we fix this?”
“Well—” Amanda leaned back in her chair “—we can get them to retract, but I’m not sure we can ‘fix’ what’s really the issue here, Carter.”
“Of course we can fix this. Anything can be fixed.” I knew this for a fact. A lifetime of bribery and extortion, holding the worst of my family at bay like wolves in a storm, had taught me that everyone could be bought and anything worth fixing could be fixed.
