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“The only reason I knew was because I stayed late one night. I got carried away going over my headshots on Photoshop. Not changing them,” she defended quickly. “Just, you know, enhancing.”
I nodded with understanding. Good journalism really wasn’t asking a lot of questions. Sometimes it wasn’t even asking any. It was knowing when to be silent and let the story come to you.
Or at least that was what I’d experienced.
I couldn’t exactly call stories about shoes and fire hydrants in small towns “good stories,” but they weren’t exactly bad.
“Anyway—” She waved her hand. “—I don’t think she knew I was there because sometimes she would get hopped up on coffee.” She gave me a meaningful look that implied she didn’t mean what we were holding in our hands before she continued. “So, these guys came, and she didn’t know I saw them until I was leaving.” She paused. “That’s when she gave me that explanation about the line, and then a bonus. And I know that bonus was for kind of keeping the news of the men’s line to myself, you know, because she wasn’t sure about it.” She gave me a look. “At least that’s what she told me. And it got me new shoes. And a purse.”
I gave a small smile. My kind of girl.
“But with her gone, she can’t exactly take back the shoes and the purse for telling you, and it doesn’t really matter now,” she continued. She squinted at the glint of traffic and lights up ahead but didn’t seem overly concerned. “Anyway, I highly doubt these guys were male models, because in order to be a model you have to be….”
“Hot?” I finished for her, something brewing in my stomach about this story.
Her eyes bulged. “Yes. Exactly. Two of them were okay. But the third one?” She shook her head. “No.”
I chewed my lip, thinking this was a long shot, but the news trucks were getting close, and I didn’t want a wasted trip out here. “He didn’t by any chance have an unfortunate moustache, bad shoes and smell of Old Spice, did he?” I asked.
Her eyes bulged once more, and she nodded rapidly while taking a large sip of her coffee. “Yes! Well, I don’t know about the Old Spice, but the rest, the moustache, shoes.” She shuddered like only a true shoe lover would at the memory. “They were wrong on so many levels.”
“Well, fuck me,” I muttered under my breath, unable to believe the way this was falling into my lap.
Monica furrowed her brow. “What?”
I evened my expression. “Sorry, nothing. Just remembered something. You don’t have a name, contact details, or mug shot for the moustache man?” I asked hopefully.
“Mug shot?”
“Sorry, I mean head shot. You know, since he’s meant to be a model,” I corrected.
Understanding dawned on her face. “Oh, right. Yeah, no. I have nothing on them. She said they weren’t going to work out. Seemed downright scared of them, actually. It was strange.”
“Yeah. Very strange,” I agreed. We were too close to the building. The murmured conversations of other journalists could be heard over the traffic sounds of the morning.
I stopped. Luckily Monica did too.
“I have to go back to work. You know, because my boss is still alive,” I said sadly. “And he’ll kill me if I don’t get him his coffee, and this story. Just one more question.”
Monica glanced back, then nodded. “Sure, make it quick.”
“You don’t have security cameras in your offices, do you?”
She seemed momentarily stunned at the question, as she should have been. I was meant to be doing a fluff piece on her dearly departed Hitler boss; such questions didn’t exactly mesh with that.
Luckily Monica came through by not overthinking the question.
Ah, youth.
“No. Well, wait. We didn’t, until some seriously hot security guys who really could’ve been male models came and installed them. Less than a month ago. Just before the visit, actually.”
Ding ding ding!
“Greenstone Security?” I clarified.
She thought on it a moment. “Yeah, that sounds right. Though I was focusing less on names and more on numbers, if you know what I mean.” She gave me a knowing smile. “There was this one guy, the boss it seemed. He had this accent.” She fanned herself. “And tattoos. And muscles. Yeah, damn near threw myself at him. No go. Must’ve been gay.”
I gritted my teeth and my unreasonable fury at the young girl who had possibly given me a pivotal break in a story I’d only gotten days ago. I couldn’t yank her hair from her bun; she might need to testify as a witness to a story I broke.
So instead of doing so, I nodded. “Must’ve been,” I agreed. “Well, I must go. But thanks for everything, you’ve been great,” I told her with maybe a little ice in my tone.
