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accused of drug crimes. He’d followed four kids—two black, two white—from the drug scene for a year. At the end of the year, the two white guys were setting off for the east coast to college at Haverford and Princeton; one of the black kids had been sentenced to fifteen years for possession, while the other was dead.
    The year after Murray won his Pulitzer, the Global Entertainment Network bought the Star, along with several hundred other papers. Harold Weekes acquired a minor Hollywood studio for its cable potential, moved the company from the outer reaches of LA to Wacker Drive, gutted the reporting staff at Global’s papers, and hired Wade Lawlor to disseminate rumors, innuendo, and outright lies, under the catchy title Wade’s World .
    Wade’s World trumpeted the claim that Obama had ordered police to collect Bibles from kids on their way to school. Wade signed on with a group disputing the president’s citizenship.
    It wasn’t Murray’s fault that his new owners preferred video to print. It wasn’t his fault that he had to scramble to keep a job, so I didn’t hold it against him that he anchored a weekly TV show on GEN. In Chicago Beat , he reported on everything from politics to the arts, but most of his shows were devoted to sensational crimes, since that’s what draws a crowd.
    Despite Harold Weekes’s hearty assurance that everyone in GEN’s headquarters loved Chicago Beat , Murray’s show aired once a week in Illinois and Indiana, although Wisconsin and Michigan affiliates sometimes picked it up. Wade’s World was shown four times daily in every city, village, and farm in America.
    I didn’t believe Murray’s career hung by the thread he kept claiming, but he was working in a poisonous environment. Lawlor was reported to pull in twenty million a year just from GEN, while his endorsement contracts probably tripled that figure. Other GEN cable stars made seven-figure salaries; in a milieu where the chief operating officer dismissed print journalism as “turning back the clock to the era of illuminated manuscripts,” no matter what Murray earned, he was bound to feel insecure.
    I felt ashamed of rubbing Murray’s face in his troubles; I said I’d go to Lawlor’s event at the Valhalla with him. And I’d regretted it the minute I walked in the door. After the encounter with Weekes in the Valhalla ballroom I was furious.
    “You could have warned me before I met your boss that you wanted my help with a story. I could have jumped in with some intelligent backup, instead of which he dismissed me as your girlfriend.”
    Murray looked sheepish. “I just couldn’t find a way to propose it to you, and then Weekes popped up, and I wanted to get the idea back in front of him. You saw the first piece, looking at the returning Iraq/Afghan vets who’ve become homeless.”
    “Yes, yes, I did. You did a great job with that. I didn’t know it was the start of a series, though.”
    “It wasn’t,” he fumed. “I had the whole series started—I was going out to one of the state mental hospitals to look at murderers found not guilty by mental defect, I had one on the advanced practice nurses who do most of the hands-on medical care of the mentally ill homeless—I had nine shows lined up, and I had my own producer’s blessing, and then, right after the one on the vets ran, Wade Lawlor stuck in an oar at the huddle, said it was banal and a resource-eater, and Weekes axed the whole series.”
    “I can’t possibly persuade Harold Weekes to listen to you instead of Lawlor,” I protested.
    “No, but I was hoping you could come on board as the resident expert on evaluating criminal evidence for the segment on people found not guilty by reason of mental defect. I’ve tried pitching that again as a single episode; I put together a list of five people who’ve been held at Ruhetal or Elgin for more than twenty years, but Lawlor keeps shooting down the idea, and I never get time alone with Weekes. I was