When I reached my floor, I found Beth standing near my cubicle. She was a tall, mousy-haired, intimidating-looking woman, but she had a huge heart and a true talent for writing. She dressed like a teenage boy in basketball shorts, T-shirts, and sneakers every freakin’ day, but it didn’t matter because she was the head writer at the paper and damn well deserved it. She got all of the biggest assignments because she put her heart and soul into every single word she wrote. I admired her.
“Hey, kid.”
“Hi Beth, how was your weekend?”
“Great. I knocked out ten thousand words.”
Of course she did. Why couldn’t I be more like that?
“What’s this?” I pointed toward a stack of papers on my desk. The cover sheet was blank except for the bold words: R. J. LAWSON.
“Jerry is giving you that story,” she said. I had no idea what it meant at first, but then I remembered hearing Jerry rant about R. J. Lawson. Jerry was obsessed with getting a story on him. I personally didn’t know anything about him.
“Me? Why in the world would he give this to me?”
Beth just smiled her knowing smile. “I don’t know, but he’s gonna be over in a sec to talk to you about it. Boy, I wanted that story, Kate. No one has been able to get an interview with him since he disappeared from public life. I’m glad you got it, though—you need it.”
I stared at her for several moments and then I mumbled, “Yeah, I know . . . might be a game changer.”
Smiling, she said, “You got it, sister.” Then she did a jump shot with a balled-up piece of paper, lofting it perfectly into the wastebasket behind me. “Swoosh, nothin’ but net.”
When she turned and walked away, I stared down at the neatly stacked papers and laughed to myself, thinking Jerry had truly lost his mind giving me a real assignment. I looked up to find him peering over the partition.
“You like? It’s an exclusive,” he said, arching his eyebrows.
“Why me?”
“Kate, what do you know about that guy?”
“Nothing except that you’ve been hounding his people for a story, and I can tell you that Beth would have easily sacrificed a limb for this assignment.”
He nodded slowly and then looked up at the ceiling as if he was thinking. The large warehouse-like room was separated by about a hundred cubicle partitions. The huge space rattled and hummed with the sound of writers chatting and typing frantically at their computers. Jerry pumped different kinds of music through the overhead speakers, creating a cocoon of creativity, but I hadn’t felt creative in a long time, and it was nobody’s fault but my own. At that moment, a sad version of the song “Heartbeats” by José González was traveling through the airwaves. I watched Jerry as he continued to look up pensively.
He was forty years old and he looked exactly like Richard Dreyfuss circa Close Encounters. He wore his bifocals on the very last millimeter of his nose, which aged him, but he thought it gave him a look of credibility. He was in love with his wife and kids, a true family man, but he had no filter at all, so it didn’t surprise me one bit when he finally looked back down and said, “You’re a good writer, Kate. You have what it takes, and you have a nice ass, too.”
“Jerry! What does that have to do with anything? I don’t want you to give me a huge assignment because I have a nice ass.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s not what I meant. I said you have what it takes. R.J. is a thirty-year-old bachelor. Looking the way you do can’t hurt.”
“Well gee, thank you,” I said sarcastically.
“You don’t want it?” He reached for the stack.
“No. I want it. I just can’t believe . . .”
“It was a compliment, Kate.”
“Okay, fine.” He didn’t mean any harm by it. Like I said, no filter. He was the most loyal man in the world, and he wasn’t trying to objectify me. I think he thought that with R.J.’s history of turning down interviews—the only thing I did know about him, based on what Beth had told me—Beth’s aggressive approach to getting a story wouldn’t be a good fit.
“Fine?”
“I would love this opportunity, Jerry, thank you. Honestly though, I’m curious. Why in the world did he agree to give us an interview—and an exclusive one, at that? We’re not exactly a nationally recognized newspaper.”
“I just bugged the hell out of him,” he said triumphantly. “I kept on sending requests until he finally replied. He said he was impressed by my persistence, and he felt our paper had more integrity than others. He most likely checked us out. He seems eager to spread the word about the winery’s sustainability and their environmentally friendly practices, which sound pretty cutting-edge. The only thing is that his e-mail stressed how extremely private he is and how he would prefer the article to focus on the wine, not his personal life. But, Kate, a story like this could really launch the Crier into a whole new league, especially if you can get the dirt our readers want. That means finding out everything there is to know about R. J. Lawson.”
I swiveled my chair out from my desk, crossed my legs, and leaned back. I was intrigued. “Tell me what you know about him.”
“Hold on to your seat, this guy is truly a conundrum. In 1998, Ryan Lawson was a young MIT graduate, computer engineering prodigy, and cofounder of the largest technology company in Silicon Valley. He had the potential to be Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak rolled into one—a savvy business mind and a technological genius.”