Blessed Are Those Who Weep (3 page)

 

Chapter 5

T
HE
SIDEWALKS
OF
North Beach are teeming with ­people, jostling on their way to work. Some of the older Italian men have already staked out spots at sidewalk tables, where they're sipping espresso and smoking cigarettes. The salty ocean breeze mingles with the aroma of fresh coffee and baked goods.

The strip clubs are still buttoned up, but the restaurants and cafés are bustling. ­People are lined up in front of one small Columbus Avenue restaurant famous for its breakfast.

Café Tucca is on my way to where I parked my car last night. I'm so sleepy I'll need more than my regular bowl of coffee today. Plus the coffee shop will have all the morning newspapers. I get a few admiring glances as I head for the café in my high-­heeled sandals, and I'm glad I'm fooling ­people.

My Italian mother has drummed into me
la bella figura
—­looking your best—­but I fail at achieving it ninety-­nine percent of the time. I interpret the philosophy my own way—­by dressing up on the days I feel the worst, sort of a bait-­and-­switch maneuver. Since today is an especially shitty morning, I spent extra time on my hair and makeup. I also threw on my nicest formfitting black wool pants, a silky navy blouse with white polka dots, and black patent-­leather slingbacks, which are totally inappropriate for covering the crime beat.

Inside the café, I flip through the stack of discarded newspapers someone left on a table while I wait for my cappuccino.

The
Bay Herald
has a tiny front-­page story by May, the night cops reporter. It has the bare basics of what happened: Five dead. Police investigating. It doesn't even identify the victims or say how they were killed. At least we have something, even if it's not much.

The
San Francisco Tribune
is on another table. I'm nervous to see what they wrote, but even so, I'm not prepared for the giant photo.

It's a picture of me. Above the fold. Under a huge headline. “Massacre in the Mission: Five Dead. Family Slain by Samurai Sword,” with a subhead: “Reporter found with baby at scene of gruesome slayings.”

In the photo, I'm looking out the backseat of the squad car with the baby's head tucked under my chin.

My index finger traces the contours of the baby's face in the black-­and-­white photo before my eyes move up to the image the photographer caught of me.

I don't recognize the look in my eyes. I don't recognize myself at all. My hair is ratty from the girl twirling it in her fingers. My lipstick is rubbed off. My mascara is smeared. The look in my eyes is what floors me. I look . . . unstable. Frantic. Deranged.

I read the headline again. Samurai sword. Yes, I suppose that would have caused the carnage I saw, but who carries around a samurai sword? And how did Andy Black at the
Tribune
get info on the murder weapon so early? Usually the cops won't release that until the coroner's report is complete. The
Tribune
kicked our ass on this story. And I was there as a witness. The realization makes my mouth dry.

Grabbing my coffee, I rush out, taking the paper with me. Did Donovan hide the papers from me? I scan the story as I walk to my car. It contains no hint that the cops have a suspect or that an arrest is pending. It says that Maria Martin's husband is in Iraq. It will take at least a week for him to get back to the U.S. because of national security issues. Along with his wife, the dead include his parents, his sister, and his nephew. The story says the child apparently has no other living relatives besides her father. My heart breaks for him. He's lost his entire family and is thousands of miles away. That little girl will grow up without knowing her mother or her grandparents or aunts and uncles or cousins.

I can't imagine life without a big family.

As soon as I get to my car, I call Kellogg.

He answers on the first ring.

“Giovanni, what the hell is going on? How do you think it looks that the
Tribune
has more details on this massacre, when you were
there
? Arnold is going off the rails about this. One of his reporters is in the middle of the biggest crime story in San Francisco since Harvey Milk was shot, and you're on the front page of the fucking competition. Jesus Christ.”

Guilt swarms over me, making my face flush with heat. I crank up the air conditioner in my car even though it's cool outside.

“They kept me past midnight, questioning me. I wanted to call, but I couldn't.”

His long sigh is a bit reassuring, but I'm still braced for an ass chewing.

“That's what I told Arnold. I know things have been tough for you lately, but I'm worried you're losing your reporter instinct.”

I pull over to the side of the road and press my forehead against the cool glass of the window, staring, unseeing, at a man waiting for a bus. What
is
wrong with me?

The images of the slain bodies come back full force. I only have time to throw open my car door before I vomit onto the pavement and convulse until I'm dry heaving. From my phone on the passenger seat, Kellogg's tiny voice asks if I'm okay and repeatedly calls my name.

When I'm finally done, I wipe my face on my sleeve. It was a delayed reaction, but I feel better. I've been operating on autopilot since yesterday.

“I'm sorry,” I say in a hoarse voice. “I don't know what happened. This has really fucked me up.”

“Head on in when you feel up to it. I'll see what I can do to try to salvage your job.”

 

Chapter 6

I
CAN
'
T
SHAKE
the memory of that girl stretching out her arms toward me or the look on her face—­like I'd thrown her to the wolves. Thinking of her as I drive across the Bay Bridge through thick, low-­hanging fog makes my heart ache and fills me with anger at the same time.
She's not yours
. But I can't help the way my body felt when it held her. As if she were my own child. Something about being the person to find her in that horrific scene has bound me to her. It doesn't make sense, but it feels more real than anything I've felt in my life.

Driving to work, the landscape is brown and gray today, leached of all color. Usually, emerging from the Caldecott Tunnel into the East Bay means a welcome change in climate from coastal fog to sunny skies. Today, coming out of the tunnel, I'm greeted with more cloud cover that stretches for miles, obscuring the summit of Mt. Diablo in the distance.

Everything seems ugly, as if my rose-­colored glasses have broken. Even other drivers on the freeway are scowling and flipping the bird and cutting ­people off.

In the newsroom, a few ­people look at me askance, but most ignore the fact that I was on the front page of the competition today. At least nobody says anything. At this point, they probably expect this kind of thing from me.

Last year, I was in the paper, too. All the Bay Area papers. For killing a man. Oh yeah, and I was in the paper the year before that, as well. Same thing. Killing someone. Both were bad men. Horrible men. One was a serial killer who preyed on children. The other was a crooked, murdering cop. Even though every single second of my life I regret killing someone, both acts were in self-­defense. If I hadn't killed them, they would have killed me or someone else.

Even so, I've been in heavy-­duty therapy about it. The guilt will haunt me to the grave. Even my priest, Father Liam—­after hearing me confess the killings nearly every week for six months—­has banned me from confessing it ever again. I've considered doing confession at another church without telling him.

And it has earned me a bit of a reputation in the newsroom. Terrible jokes abound, like the sign in the copy editor area that says, “Don't fuck with Giovanni's copy or she'll send you swimming with the fishes.”

The sexy cops calendar didn't help any, either. Someone hung it up in the newsroom, and there is endless teasing about it. And it's not only jealous women who give me a hard time. The men are just as bad. For instance, Jon, the investigative reporter, will make a big scene, saying, “Gee, I wonder what day it is today? Let me go consult with Giovanni's hunky boy toy and find out.”

Finally Kellogg made them all back off. But I'm sure they still talk about me behind my back.

Today it doesn't help that all the TVs in the newsroom are showing recaps of the massacre footage, including me driving away in the squad car with the baby. A brief glance reminds me I look like a crazy, homeless lady. Not my finest TV moment. Not in line with
la bella figura
. At all.

KXYZ is on the big screen, and even from across the newsroom I can read the words under the footage of me holding the baby—­“Gabriella Giovanni, reporter with the
Bay Herald
.”

It explains the stack of missed message slips waiting for me on my desk. The news clerk adds two more to the pile as I slide into my chair.

“Thank God you're here,” she says. ­“People have lost their fucking minds this morning calling for you.” She rolls her eyes and stalks off as only a five-­foot-­tall, eighty-­pound woman can.

“Not my fault,” I say to her back. Flipping through the stack of messages, I roll my eyes, too.

One message is blunt:
What's your alibi? Pretty convenient you were the one to find them.

Another is kinder: . . .
is a psychic. Wants to meet with you to tell you who the Mission Massacre killer is.

Sometime since last night, the hive mentality dubbed the slayings “the Mission Massacre”—­probably based on the
Tribune
's headline.

After the third message
—­Baby is possessed and killed family telepathically—­
I stop reading
.

But my phone doesn't stop ringing. Unfortunately, the publisher insists we answer calls to our desk, even if they are wack jobs. He says you never know. Every once in a while, he's right, too.

In between answering calls, I wade through the voice mails waiting for me and nibble on a packet of cracker-­and-­cheese sandwiches from the vending machine. One call is from a radio announcer. He actually sounds pretty nice. And normal.

“Dave Schrader here. Darkness Radio. I heard about your . . . experience . . . with the Mission Massacre. I was wondering, with all that you've seen and done in your job, if you'd be my guest on
True Crime Tuesdays
. If so, can you please give me a call?”

Chris Lopez, my good friend and favorite photographer at our newspaper, is always trying to get me to listen to Darkness Radio, says I'd dig it. I hit save and go to the next message. I delete most without listening to them in their entirety, but one makes me pause. I listen to it twice, taking notes the second time.

The woman doesn't leave her name, but she has a lot to say:

“Isn't that poor woman's husband military? Good luck with him getting any support on dealing with that tragedy. The military is trying to hide it, but my sister's husband is stationed in Kentucky, and there's at least one soldier she knows who killed himself after he found out his wife had been in a car accident. She was in a coma and died before he even got leave to come back home to see her and say good-­bye. And I know at least one other soldier who killed himself and his wife in front of their two kids only a week after he got back from Iraq. They are seeing some horrific things over there, and our military is doing nothing to help.”

I start jotting down notes on what she is saying, sensing a story in here somewhere. It has been nearly a year since the invasion of Iraq and somehow none of this has been reported yet. Or if it has been, it's only been on a small-­scale level.

“And there's more,” she continues. “Not just suicides. There have been at least three soldiers who come home from Iraq and beat the living daylights out of their wives. They are seeing things over there that we don't know about and that they can't handle once they get back here. The worst part is the military isn't doing anything about it. My sister said that her husband suffers from depression and he's afraid to go to the doctor on base because he's worried they will pooh-­pooh his disease and might not even cover the cost of his meds.”

I wish this woman had left her phone number. It sounds like a good story. I'm sure Maria Martin's husband will need a lot of support after what happened to his family, and if this woman is right, it doesn't sound like the military will be the one to give it to him. I wonder if he'll talk to me about it. Not now, but maybe later, after some time has passed?

What an injustice. They risk their lives and get worse than nothing in return? As I'm getting angry about it, my phone rings again.

The next caller points out that it is “disgusting” that I was holding a baby while my face was covered in blood. I take a peek at the photo in the
Tribune
. There is no blood. The caller is either blind or crazy.

“Thank you for calling,” I say and hang up without bothering to argue. The phone immediately rings again as I'm tossing most of the disgusting cheese-­and-­cracker things into the trash.

I snatch up the phone and say in an irritated voice, “Newsroom.”

“Gabriella Giovanni?” The woman has a thick accent.

“This is she.” I'm tapping my pencil on the desk, waiting for another crazy stream of nonsense.

“I am Maria Martin's mother.”

My pencil freezes. Didn't the
Trib
say all of the baby's relatives had died in the massacre except her father? Is this a crank call?

“Yes. What can I help you with?” I scramble to find a notebook in the mess of papers on my desk.

“I want my Lucy. They say that she has to go to her father. That
pendejo
.” She sort of sputters out the last word.

The black-­eyed baby's name is Lucy
. And I don't know much Spanish, but I do know this woman didn't call the father a prince.

“Ma'am, what is your name?”

“Teresa Castillo.”

I scribble it down.

“Mrs. Castillo, have you talked to the San Francisco Police Department?” She could still be a kook, but if she called the police, she's probably legitimate.

“Yes. Detective Khoury says the father gets Lucy. Nothing I can do about it. They will not give her to me.”

She knows Khoury. It is the girl's grandmother
.

“Why are you calling me?”

“TV. I saw the look on your face. You care about her, not just getting a story in the paper.”

She's right.

“Miss Giovanni, you have to believe me when I say this: That man, that
devil,
cannot get my granddaughter. I will die before I let that happen.”

The way she says it makes me believe her. I don't understand.

“What do you mean? He's her father.”

“Come see me in person. I will tell you.”

Just like her daughter. She wants to talk in person. She rattles off her address. She lives in San Juan Bautista, at least a two-­hour drive. I scribble the address down obediently, but she hangs up before I can tell her I probably can't drive that far to talk to her in person.

I can't help but worry about what she has said. She'd rather die than let the father have the baby? I wonder if this is some weird “no man is good enough for my daughter” deal. But she called him “the devil.” There was something in her voice that indicated she doesn't use that word lightly.

The grandmother's desperation is so real that for a few brief seconds, I consider making a road trip to San Juan Bautista, until Kellogg swaggers over to my desk, butting his big belly up against my cubicle by accident. For a minute, the books I have balanced on a shelf wobble precariously.

“You okay?” he asks. Without waiting for an answer, he tells me that Nicole, my best friend and the courts reporter for the paper, will cover the massacre.

I nod.

“You're too close to this one,” he says in a voice that leaves no room for argument. “There's a way you can make up for today's snafu. Arnold says if you write a first-­person account of what you saw inside that apartment, we'll save face a little.”

What you saw inside that apartment
. I swallow and nod.

“Can you handle that?” Kellogg's brows knit in concern. “I could tell him no, but he's so pissed off at you right now, I think you should do whatever he wants to appease him.”

Kellogg clears his throat and continues. “You didn't hear this from me, but there's been some talk of layoffs. The classified ads from Silicon Valley are shrinking, and the big guys at Knight Ridder are starting to panic.”

That sounds like blackmail. “If I write what the publisher wants, I can keep my job?” My words drip fury. How dare the publisher tell a reporter what to write?

“It's not like that,” Kellogg says, not meeting my eyes and picking at a piece of loose plastic on my cubicle wall. “You know I'd quit before I let that happen. This is just an account of what you saw. Taking advantage of being there first. No sweat. I think you need to do this for several reasons: probably good therapy for you to get it out of your head, it is something only our paper will have that might help make up for the
Trib
's scoop, and it wouldn't hurt to have Arnold on your good side.”

“What if it hurts the investigation if I put those details in the paper?”

Kellogg straightens up, tilts his head, and looks at me sideways.

“What?” I narrow my eyes at him, wary of what he'll say next.

“You know I've never said squat about you dating a cop. You've done a good job staying professional and not letting it affect your newspaper instincts. But right now you need to remember what side you're on. You're a goddamn good reporter, but you're walking a thin line here. I know you've had a lot of personal shit go on the past two years, and I've given you a ton of slack. Because you're damn good. Someone else—­well, I would've let them go a long time ago. What you just said, about hurting the investigation? Don't forget what your job is here, or there'll be some big problems.

“You're not a cop. You're a reporter. Don't forget it. Now, write the story. If you don't want to do it for the publisher, do it for me.”

He lumbers back to his desk and squeezes into his cubicle, causing a minor earthquake around him. He could have taken over the big corner office when he was promoted to executive editor, but he wants to stay in the trenches with his reporters. He's the smartest and best editor I've ever had, and I'd do anything for him, so his words sting. I'm not only shocked by his accusation; I'm also ashamed that I've given him reason to doubt my loyalty.

At that moment, the big-­screen TV on the opposite wall shows the apartment building where the slayings occurred and once again cuts to a shot of me in the back of the police car with that same dazed look in my eyes. Aren't ­people sick of seeing that footage?

I stare at the screen, seeing the baby girl's head nuzzled in my neck. It's a big story. A huge, giant, behemoth story. Kellogg is right. Of course I should write a first-­person account about it. It's something no other newspaper or TV station could possibly have.

At the same time, I can't jeopardize any case the cops might have. Whoever deprived that baby girl of her family needs to be behind bars. And I'm not going to do anything to prevent that from happening. I'll write the story. For Kellogg. Not the publisher. But I'm not putting anything in my story that may hurt the case.