“So you wanna be a reporter. It may not be the oldest profession, but it’s the best.” —Humphrey Bogart as a newspaper editor in Deadline USA.
Investigative reporting is about uncovering what people want to hide. The danger comes when they want to hide it badly enough. The Closed Circle is an 80,000-word crime and suspense novel. Here are the first two chapters.
CHAPTER 1 — Zev Conn
San Francisco, July 27, 1989 –– 1:15 a.m.
Zev Conn ambled down O’Farrell Street in his alligator-skin cowboy hat and leather-trimmed blazer, a girl on each arm. The flashy blonde and busty brunette were employees from his massage parlor, and his task after closing was to escort them home through the ghostly fog of the Tenderloin.
Rounding onto Mason Street, Conn paid little attention to the Japanese man in a business suit weaving toward them, his boyish face lit by the happy glow of alcohol. As the man stumbled aside to let them pass, the blonde glanced back in amusement.
Then she screamed.
The man fired five shots at Zev Conn’s back.
Loud pops in the empty night.
Both women were screaming now.
The boyish-faced Japanese man calmly turned the corner and disappeared into the fog. By dawn he was on a freighter under the Golden Gate Bridge, heading home.
CHAPTER 2 — Tom Miller
San Francisco, March 20, 1994 –– 6:30 p.m.
My third day in America I found myself facing two hundred angry gays.
“YOU MUST CLEAR THIS AREA IMMEDIATELY,” blared a cop with a bullhorn. A bottle flew over his head and shattered against the Zion Baptist Church, where tonight’s guest preacher was urging the death penalty for homosexuals.
“Faggots in! Bigots out!” chanted protesters clogging the street as riot police with helmets and shields marched up the block, boots slapping against rain-soaked pavement. Gridlocked drivers trying to get home for Sunday supper blasted their horns, jangling my sleep-deprived nerves and making me want to run, get away, turn my back on the whole chaotic mess. I mean, really, I wasn’t even supposed to be here.
Thirty minutes ago I’d been sound asleep in my hotel room when the phone rang.
“Miller?”
“Um, yeah, who’s this?”
“Brad. I need you to—”
“Who?”
“Brad, goddammit. Assignment desk. I need you to work. Right now.”
I blinked away confusion, still shaking off jet lag from Japan.
“Look, Brad, I don’t start till tomorrow.”
“No, you look, Miller. I’m down a cameraman. You’re all I’ve got.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Fuck sake, yes or no?”
“You got gear for me?”
“Just get here,” and he hung up.
I dragged myself from the warm bed and rummaged through wrinkled clothes in my suitcase, already regretting my decision to leave Okinawa for this foreign place.
The first raindrops hit me as I ran from the hotel across a wide boulevard called Van Ness Avenue and slid into the marble lobby of the television station with its chrome sign proclaiming KUUL-TV San Francisco. Pronounced “COOL-TV,” though during my orientation tour on Friday I heard one employee call it CRUEL-TV.
A security guard waved me onto the elevator to the second-floor newsroom, where Brad hunched over a line of police scanners. His 300-pound bulk made him a one-man crowd behind the raised assignment desk.
“Tom Miller reporting for duty,” I announced with a mock salute.
He scowled and handed me directions. “Gay protest on Army Street. Your reporter is Mark Mori. Little Asian guy. He’ll meet you there.”
“How will I find him?”
“He’ll find you. I told him to look for a big white kid who just graduated high school.”
“I’m twenty-three.”
“Good for you.” He tossed me a set of keys. “Car 15. Basement garage. Camera in trunk.” His scowl got scowlier. “You can handle this, right?”
“Absolutely.”
As I headed away he yelled, “We drive on the right here!”
It was a straight shot to Army Street but stalled traffic forced me to park two blocks away. I jumped out and rifled through the trunk, looking for rain gear but finding only a box of Hefty Trash Bags. Shit, shit, shit. I used one bag to cover the Sony Betacam, tailoring the green plastic around the lens and viewfinder with gaffer tape, then used two more bags to make a hood and poncho for myself.
Several news cameras were across the street from the church. I jostled through wet protestors to join them, stumbling over the curb at the sight of three heavily-whiskered men dressed as nuns, faces painted white with black lipstick, their wing-like habits shedding water. They gawked back as if I was the odd one. An Asian man with an umbrella angled toward me through the crowd, shouting to be heard. “Are you Tom?” I nodded and automatically started to bow before he reached out to shake hands. “Mark Mori. Welcome to America.” He smiled at my trash-bag outfit. “Lovely gown.”
I gave a weak smile back. “Just something I threw together.”
Mori was a foot shorter, six or seven years older, and far more stylish in his made-for-TV trench coat. “The SWAT team is about to sweep the street,” he said. “We need to get behind them.”
“Behind them?”
“Yeah. Problem?”
A veteran cameraman once told me, Never get close to a riot. Stay back and let your zoom do the work. But I needed this job too much to argue.
“No, sir. No problem.”
Which is how I found myself practically humping the police as they smashed into the protesters. Through my viewfinder I saw men pushed on their heels, kicking at shields, splashing down on hard pavement or scrambling away. A quick pan left caught batons landing on backs and raised arms, curses and screams filling the air along with flying bottles and chunks of concrete. Something thudded off a cop’s helmet, making me flinch under my plastic bag. Police trampled a man who grabbed my leg as another protester with a rainbow flag charged me, leveling his flagpole like a spear. As I struggled to free my leg, a cop stepped in and knocked the flagpole aside with his shield, swinging his baton against the charging guy’s head with a sound like a piñata full of watermelon. The poor bastard fell with his banner, breaking the battle line and allowing police to surge ahead, scattering the crowd.
It was over in two minutes. A few arrests and some bloody heads for the paramedics.
“Good work,” Mark said. “Give me your tape and you’re done for the night.”
I popped the cassette from my camera. “See you on TV.”
* * *
I sat on the edge of my hotel bed, wide-awake for the 11:00 o’clock news and eager to see my first camerawork in America. Mark Mori sat on the glossy news set, introducing the gay riot story in his deep broadcaster voice. But when the video played, something was wrong. The images of charging police and scrambling bodies were all shot from a blurry distance. None of it was mine.
I clicked off the TV and fell backward on the bed. Where was my stuff?
The phone rang a few minutes later and I lunged for it, hoping it might be Sami, the girl I left behind in Japan. “Moshi-moshi,” I answered before my love-sick brain caught up to the sad reality that a call from Sami was impossible. She didn’t have this number and wouldn’t be calling me anyway.
“Tom?” came a hesitant voice on the other end. “It’s Mark Mori.”
“Oh. Mark.”
“Did you see the story?”
“Yeah. What happened?”
“There was nothing on your tape. Complete blank. I don’t think you were rolling.”
Not rolling? Oh, God, no. I searched my memory for the red light in the viewfinder that shows the camera is recording. All I could picture was a cop hitting someone’s head. It should have been my head.
“Maybe it––” I stammered, looking for excuses. “Maybe the tape got wet, or––are you sure?”
He didn’t answer.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” was all I could say.
“The news director called. He wants to see both of us at nine sharp.”
Mark hung up before I could ask more.
Not rolling.
The worst mistake a cameraman can make.
Tomorrow was supposed to be my first day on the job. I was afraid it would be my last.
[updated 8/25/24]
Craig Franklin 