Category: Newspapering

I had talked to the woman several times, and thanked her, but I had never met her.

I won’t say who she worked for, but I will say she was secretly photocopying their records and giving them to me. All in the public interest and, yes, in my interest too.

Sometimes she would mail the records to me, sometimes she would leave them at the front desk, in the lobby of The News & Observer where I worked as an investigative reporter. This time, however, she wanted to meet. 

She didn’t tell me her name — she never told me her name — but she told me what she looked like, and that she would be wearing a yellow dress. She asked me to meet her at a restaurant, sit at the table next to her, but not to acknowledge her.

I saw her as soon as I walked in.  She was sitting at table for two, on a bench with her back to the wall. There was an unoccupied table for two beside her and I sat down there, not three feet away. There was a brown manila envelope on the bench between us, at her side, the records she had promised. I picked up the envelope and moved it to my other side.

A moment later she spoke to me. Only she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking straight ahead.

She told me she was afraid.  If anyone found out what she had done, what she was doing, she said, they might hurt her, or worse.

I didn’t know what to say.

She asked me if I ever worried about something like that, that I would be harmed.  I kept looking straight ahead, at the empty seat across from me.

“Yea, I guess so,” I said.  “Sometimes. Not very often.  But I took care of that problem. I have a ton of life insurance.”

She seemed to relax.

“I have insurance too,” she said. “I have a gun in my purse.”

Coming Monday: Liar!

Back in the day there was no guard stationed in the lobby of The New & Observer in Raleigh, where I worked as an investigative reporter, and anyone could ride the elevator to the third floor, walk up to your desk, and get a load off his or her mind.

I handled a lot of the walk-in tipsters, including nearly all of the ones who were not playing with a full deck: the ones who had been hexed; the ones who knew where Jimmy Hoffa was buried; the ones with convoluted conspiracy theories.

My objective was always the same, to try to conclude our little meeting without doing anything that would prompt them to lean over my desk and say, ominously: “You’re one of them, aren’t you.”

One day I looked up and there stood a tipster who introduced himself and said he was in the public relations business. He handed me his business card.  The card said: Incommunicado, Inc.

[Careful, Pat!]

I listened politely to his tip: the governor of North Carolina and the state director of prisons were distributing cocaine to community college students, hiding it in audio-visual equipment that was moved from campus to campus.  He told me he had written a little booklet, a poem, about the governor and his partner in crime which he called HGIELAR.   In case that word doesn’t jump right out at you, I’ll tell you: It’s “Raleigh” spelled backwards.

Here is how his poem ended: 

“Run Bob, run Lee,

Run from Hgielar and run from me.

Where you gonna run to, where you gonna go?

I just told the world that you run snow.”

NOTE:  “Snow,” of course, is street slang for cocaine. Jimmy Hoffa, former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, vanished on July 30, 1975. His body has never been found.

Coming Monday: Whose Side Was I On?