"Best, Mark - Ceiling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Best Mark)

“You know, Leo, I have a feeling you’ll be giving a retraction real soon.”
I left Radovic’s a little discouraged and scanned the street for the old man.
I couldn’t see him anywhere. I found a pay phone that had miraculously escaped
having its white pages stolen and looked up the old man’s number, but there
was no Josef Ilanovitch listed. I thought of asking around the neighborhood,
but I was pretty sure Louis Farrakan smoozing at a white supremacists
convention would get a friendlier reception than I would.
Instead, I called Martin Wilcox. Marty was the best researcher at the Beacon,
and he wasn’t a Penguins fan. I left him a voice mail message, telling him
what I needed. He called back thirty minutes later with Ilanovitch’s address.
I keep a Pittsburgh street map in my car, but even using it, I didn’t find
Ilanovitch’s home for nearly an hour. His road was an alleyway, his apartment
an unnumbered door next to an Indian dog groomer. A mural of a well-coifed
poodle overlapped on the old man’s door, making it look like part of the
canine chop shop. When I finally realized this was his place, I knocked on the
dog’s rear end. The unlocked door swung open.
“Mr. Ilanovitch?” My voice echoed up the flight of stairs. “It’s Mike
Masterson, Pittsburgh Beacon. We met at Radovic’s today?” I walked up the
steps, continuing to talk out loud. The top door was also ajar, so I went in.
When I found the old man he was already dead. Ilanovitch was shot twice, once
in each eye. It was obviously a message, as his frail bones would have
succumbed to the obvious beating he had taken. I quickly called 911 from my
cell phone, but I knew speed wasn’t necessary. St. Peter had scooped me on
this one. I felt equal parts nausea and anger. I wasn’t mad up until then. The
attempt to frame me I almost considered fair play, part of the game. This was
no longer a game.
Ilanovitch had lived and died in a studio apartment that almost qualified as a
closet. I didn’t have enough time to search the room before the police made it
a reporter free zone, but I gave the ceiling a quick once over. It looked like
the original plaster job, except around the ceiling fan fixture. But the
spackling compound was yellow with age and the inch of dust on the blades had
been undisturbed since the seventies. Whatever ceiling the old man spoke of
wasn’t above me now.
The uniformed officer who answered the call was a Penguins fan, and after
identifying myself, I felt the temperature in the room drop about twenty
degrees. They brought me to the station where three cops asked me the same
questions three different ways. Either I answered right or the power of the
press (as well as the paper’s legal representative, who showed up during the
interrogation waving papers around) scared them into releasing me.
I went back to the paper, avoiding the downstairs newsroom. Hoffman had given
me three days, and I knew her word was as good mine, but I didn’t want to be
on display. Besides, I needed to make some calls. Another feature of staying
in the old newsroom upstairs is that, when the paper remodeled, they put in a
new phone system that a degree from MIT wouldn’t help you navigate. But they
never got around to our floor, which suited me, just fine. I like a phone you
dial rather than program.
My first call was to a source at the County Coroner’s office. One bottle of
good scotch each month guaranteed me a copy of any autopsy reports as fast as
the police get one. I also called three other sources I was using on my
Russian story. They were about as enlightening as a Hard Copy exclusive.