Page 12 of A Mind of Her Own

The last two weeks of Alex’s summer internship went even faster than the rest. Once they had unburdened themselves of their deepest secrets, she and Oliver felt lighter than air and enjoyed each other even more. Oliver occasionally had trouble controlling his desire for her, but she had no intention of making a mistake, taking a chance and getting pregnant. She was more sensible than he was, most of the time.

“For a man who says he doesn’t want children, you’re awfully willing to gamble, Oliver Foster,” she scolded him, and he apologized.

“You drive me crazy, Alex. I lose my mind sometimes.”

“So do I,” she admitted. “I just don’t want to make a terrible mistake and regret it later.”

“I wouldn’t, if something like that happened,” Oliver said to her. He knew that now. Lately, he had been beginning to warm to the idea of having children with her one day, which was an enormous change for him. He hadn’t said anything to her, and he wasn’t ready to, but he had been giving it some serious thought. But he also knew that she wasn’t ready to have children at her age. She had other plans and dreams to attend to first.

“Speaking of gambling, when can I come and play poker with you, before I leave?” He had taken her to play with them once, and she had won some money. His colleagues loved having her around. She was gorgeous to look at, and a lot of fun. She had had even more fun this time at her job with more responsibilities than she had the year before. And she and Oliver were even more comfortable with each other, especially since they’d made their confessions to each other. They were like two kids sometimes, and he felt like one when he was with her. She had given him back a piece of his youth, and he had done the same for her, as the war and the pandemic faded slowly into the past.

—

He finally took her to play cards at the paper one night. Technically she wasn’t supposed to be in the Crime reporters’ room, in case there was confidential information lying around on someone’s desk. But they ignored the rules sometimes at night, and the Crime reporters were an unruly group at best, at any hour. Someone had brought in southern fried chicken and ribs that night, and they were helping themselves with paper plates. Alex took some, and they went to play cards in the back room. They’d been playing for about an hour and she had won ten dollars when an alarm went off. The men looked at each other and shrugged and folded their cards and stood up.

“What happened?” she asked them. They were putting their jackets on and stubbing out their cigars.

“Work time for us, Princess. That bell means they need more than one crew. Something big must have happened,” Sam said to her. Several phones were ringing and Oliver answered one. He looked serious as he listened, jotted down a quick note. Tommy was on another phone and writing furiously, and they exchanged rapid-fire information when they both hung up. Alex was listening raptly.

There had been shootings in three different locations. There were bodies on the scene. Seven people killed in all, and three injured. Ambulances had already been called and hadn’t arrived yet. The police needed two trucks from the morgue.

“It looks like some of the families had a clash tonight. We’ve been expecting this for a while,” Oliver said. He looked alert but unsympathetic. This wasn’t a situation where innocent bystanders had gotten hurt, or a natural disaster involving children. This was gangsters jostling each other for large amounts of ill-gotten gains. They were making a fortune from Prohibition and fighting like dogs for it. Oliver had no sympathy for them, and the mess they made was his job to report. All the men who were going chimed in, and suddenly Oliver turned to Alex.

“Do you want to come?” he asked her. “All the shooters are either dead or gone. It will be ugly, but not dangerous.” If it were, he wouldn’t have suggested it to her. “You can get to see what I do here.” She liked the idea, and she wasn’t squeamish.

“Will there be guts all over the place?” she asked him, and he shook his head.

“The boys from the morgue will get there before we do. You can just wait in the car and watch from the distance if you want, or you can take a cab back to the hotel.” But it was exciting to be part of the action. And she was excited to go with him, for a bigger glimpse into his world.

She rode in a car with Oliver, Sam, and Tommy. Four other reporters were in a car going to one of the other locations, and a third team had already left, and photographers had been dispatched to all three locations and were getting into trucks outside. It was going to be a big story the next day.

The men were talking among themselves as Oliver drove, and Alex glanced at him.

“You won’t get in trouble for taking me?” she asked.

“No one will know. The boys won’t say anything. Every now and then, someone takes a civilian with them. If it looks too rough when we get there, I’ll send you home. The cops don’t care who we bring with us. There will be a million cops on the scene, and reporters from other papers. A scene like this, involving three of the families, will be buzzing with people coming and going all night. You’re probably the first woman who has ever done this though.” It felt like an honor to her.

They arrived at the scene minutes later. They were somewhere below Hell’s Kitchen, where some of the Mafia operations were. And as Oliver had predicted, it was chaos, but as soon as they reached the epicenter of where the action had happened, he knew he’d made a mistake. Alex was right behind him and hadn’t seen anything yet. He stopped her and told her to turn around. The drivers from the morgue hadn’t brought enough tarps with them, and there were bodies all over the ground, with gunshot wounds in their heads, half their heads blown off, their brains and entrails spilling on the ground in pools of blood. The photographers were working, two other papers were at the scene, and the police were rushing in and out, directing what they wanted pictures of and trying to identify the victims, since they knew most of them.

To make matters worse, as they were standing outside a warehouse that belonged to one of the families where they received shipments of bootleg liquor, which was what it was all about, it turned out that there was one live shooter left. He came out with guns blazing. A police marksman killed him in two seconds, and there were no other victims. The minute the shooting started, Oliver pulled Alex to the ground and laid his body on top of her. They crawled to a spot behind one of the police cars after that, and waited until the area had been checked again and they were sure there were no other shooters left. Oliver was shaking, realizing what could have happened to Alex. He had been a fool to bring her. He left the scene with her as soon as he was sure it was safe, and hailed a cab for her. He didn’t even like sending her home alone from that neighborhood, but he had no other choice.

“I’m sorry, Alex, this was really stupid of me. Lock the car doors and go back to the hotel.” He gave the driver a big tip, they took off, and he went back to the crime scene to work.

Tommy gave Oliver a quizzical look. “Did the Princess go home?”

“Yeah. I was insane to bring her. I thought this would be no big deal.” Tommy nodded.

“It’s always a big deal when these three families are involved.”

“I should have known better,” Oliver blamed himself. They had all grown blasé and impervious to the violence they saw every day.

They were at the crime site till three a.m., getting the story and the pictures to go with it, with the bodies strewn all over the place, until the morgue finally took them away.

Oliver had a straight scotch when he got home, and he apologized to Alex the next day.

“It was exciting to see what you deal with in a day’s work,” Alex said, sobered by the experience. “Are you in trouble because of me?” she asked him.

“Probably. I deserve it. I can deal with it. I’m just sorry I exposed you, and scared you, and put you in danger. You could have been shot.” He was furious with himself.

He was called up to the managing editor’s office that afternoon and given a strong dressing-down. He said that she had brought him something at the office and he didn’t have time to take her home, so he had brought her with him, thinking the crime scene was clean. And instead there was another shooter. He admitted his mistake and apologized profusely.

“The next time you pull a stunt like that, you’re fired, Foster. Is that clear?” The managing editor didn’t mince words. “There are no guests at a crime scene. This isn’t a tourist attraction. Can you imagine what her family would have done to us, if she’d been shot or killed?” Oliver didn’t tell him that she had no family. That wasn’t the point. And his boss was right.

“Perfectly, sir.” He took the tongue-lashing like a man because he knew he was guilty. He had a new respect for the work they did, and the men who protected them. And he knew they’d been lucky when the shooter came out of the warehouse. Oliver went back to his office and ran into Tommy on the way to his desk.

“Did you get fired?” he asked Oliver, worried.

“Not this time. And I won’t do that again. The shooter could have killed Alex.”

“Thank God he didn’t,” Tommy said, and they both went back to work. It was a huge story, and Oliver had written it for the front page. It had given him another idea for his book, and he exhaled and relaxed, with a powerful lesson learned. If anything had happened to Alex, he would never have forgiven himself.

—

The girls in Society had given Alex a goodbye lunch that day. Sylvia gave her a scarf that they had all chipped in to buy her. There was a cake, and they were all sorry to see Alex leave. She was sorry too.

“I’ll be back,” Alex promised, still thinking of the crime scene the night before. She’d been lucky. And she knew she wouldn’t be back the following summer, since she’d be in school in the accelerated program till September to get her diploma. But she hoped she’d be back one day. Maybe for a real job and not just as a summer intern. She would like that a lot.

She and Oliver went to dinner at P.J. Clarke’s that night. He told her that he’d had a stern lecture from his boss but hadn’t gotten fired.

“And it gave me an idea for my book. I needed a scene like that,” he said with a smile. “I’m going to miss you,” he told her, and she knew he meant it.

“Will I hear from you this time?” she asked him, but she wasn’t as worried as she had been the year before when she left. This year she knew he loved her. She didn’t know what they would do about it, or if it would work out, but at that exact moment, she loved him, and he loved her too. And when he left her at her hotel that night and kissed her, it was a kiss she wouldn’t forget. They just had to wait and see how things turned out. The one thing she had learned was that you could never predict anything, and she didn’t try to. Things would happen as they were meant to, in ways they couldn’t even begin to guess.