Page 41 of Head Room (Caught Dead in Wyoming #15)

Orson Jardine grilled me for more than an hour.

I’d offered him Mike’s chair, which he declined. Instead, we sat face-to-face on the visitors’ side of the desk.

I thought I held up fairly well, especially balancing keeping options flexible while sounding like we had some plans.

“Orson, there’s no getting around that this is a major step down for you.

The pay, the equipment, the resources, and, yes, the product.

As we’ve said, there are compensations. Mike as owner is a big one.

The opportunity to teach on the job. This newsroom is developing a different feel. There’s less . . . It’s more . . .”

“Like Needham,” he filled in.

“Yes. Not that we have a roster of journalists as good as he is—”

“Can’t expect that.”

“—but it’s growing more cooperative, collegial.”

“There’s a faction who’d latch onto words like cooperative and collegial to bolster their conviction we’re all in league together.”

“Proving they don’t know the meanings of the words — and they don’t know journalists.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Used to laugh at the idea of journalists conspiring. First you’d have to get them to agree and they rival lawyers for arguing.

Plus, you grab a swarm of ambitious people whose favorite thing is unearthing secrets and telling them to the world, people who each want their story in the lead.

Then you try to get them all to work together and to keep it a secret? ”

“You used to laugh at the idea — not anymore?”

“Not a lot to laugh about these days. The people who fall for conspiracies think every journalist is in on it — with a different it for each conspiracy believer. Instead of following Occam’s razor, they swallow convoluted conspiracies, swallowing whole the results of Brandolini’s law.”

“Brandolini—? Oh, the bullshit asymmetry principle.”

“That’s it. Named after programmer Alberto Brandolini who, the story goes, came up with it while watching an interview with former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.”

“Convicted of tax fraud,” I contributed about Berlusconi.

“And still elected. Brandolini recognized that creating and spouting bullshit takes little effort—”

“And no thought.”

“—while refuting it entails effort that’s orders of magnitude greater.”

“Because the bullshit creator wings it, unrestrained by aligning with reality or facts, while the refuter researches, checks, and crafts a response.”

All of which applied to scammers. Might use that in Helping Out!

Orson shifted in his chair. “You do know this is a crazy idea Mike and you are trying to put together. It’s going back to the days of apprenticeships, except the whiz kids you want to hire have degrees and think they know everything already.

Why would they come to the smallest market in the country?

Not only do they not get the newest and shiniest equipment—”

KWMT was well behind most stations in that category, even with Mike’s improvements.

“—but they’d also get old crocks telling them how they did things back in the day. That’s me, not you, Elizabeth.”

“What truly worries you about taking on this job, Orson?”

He squinted at me.

“The tech. The lingo. The visual requirements. The time constraints on telling the story. None of that’s my native language.”

“Telling the truth is the same. Finding the core of a story is the same. Ensuring you have the necessary facts is the same. The rest? You’ll become fluent. Talking about old crocks, I recently complained about being a tech fossil and artifact compared to these kids.”

“You? You came up in this arm of the biz.”

“Then they replaced that arm with robotics.”

He snorted in amusement.

“It’s shifting from specialists in individual aspects of newsgathering to everybody’s a one-man band with expertise in everything,” I continued. “How can I compete with that?”

“You don’t.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly.

“You don’t need to compete with that. Not only because the owner holds you in the highest possible regard, but also because you have the guts to investigate, the smarts to find out, the determination to put it all together.

The others have potential for that, but you’ve honed it.

You give them the goal to shoot for with all their tech wizardry.

You know what makes a good story and how to make it a great story. ”

I took in his words for a beat, okay, maybe two, because they felt warm and luxurious flowing over me.

Then I looked up at him. “So do you.”

Silent at first, he then said, “I see what you did there, E.M. Danniher. Neat. Very neat.”

I let that compliment slide by.

“A couple days ago I was thinking about wanting to talk to Nola after a story she did. Not about the journalism. About her, the person who saw what she saw.”

He knew without hearing more. “The fire scene with the body. Yes, there are things we can teach them about journalism, about their lives as journalists, even about life in general.”

He clapped his hands on the arms of the chair as he rose.

“I’ll say this, you have me thinking, you and Mike. You certainly have me thinking.”

* * * *

Miracles do happen.

James Longbaugh had an opening at the same time I did.

I parked between the courthouse and sheriff’s department, leaving a short walk across the street to reach the sidewalk on the side street where James had his law office.

Before I started the walk, a figure came around the corner from the sheriff’s department.

“Hello, Jay—”

I needn’t have bothered. Jay Haus was already past.

He was two-for-two in ignoring me lately. That could hurt, except for the sleazeball factor.

With some people, you’re happy to have them ignore you.

Once at my destination, I had the odd feeling James Longbaugh would have liked to ignore me, too. But he was far too polite.

He said, “I am not, strictly speaking, representing the museum in this matter. More like acting as a . . .”

He gestured with one hand, indicating he wasn’t going to try to pin down what he was acting as with words.

Pinning things down with words was one way to describe my job. “Broker? Mediator?”

“More the latter than the former. But, instead of two parties both feeling wronged as usually happens with mediation, we have two parties who want to avoid feeling wronged later on. In that way, it’s rather refreshing.

But—” I knew what was coming. I’d heard this but from James, as well as other lawyers, before. “—I can’t tell you more.”

Told you so.

“I can’t even tell you for sure if they — the veterans — approached a registered agent as they indicated they were considering at one point.”

“A real estate agent?” Even as I asked it, I knew I hadn’t misheard him. I’d heard registered agents.

“No. Registered agent. Business entities in Wyoming have to have a registered agent in-state with a physical address as an official point of contact for the state or other legal or business transactions.”

“Business entities?” I could see how the museum qualified, but he’d said the veterans. “Like a partnership?”

He nodded. “Or other kinds of LLCs. The vets are debating forming an LLC. In Wyoming, it can be someone in the business, as long as they meet modest standards. Having an unrelated registered agent mostly comes in for out-of-state and international companies registering here.”

That set off bells in my head. Not a full chorus, but a couple ding-dongs.

Giving no sign of recognizing the clanging in my head, he went on. “For those businesses there are various levels of registered agents, including CPAs and lawyers.”

“You?”

“No. I don’t care to get into that. Plenty of other things to keep my practice more than busy.”

“And the veterans are using one of these registered—?”

“As I said, I don’t know if they determined that was the direction they wanted to go. I suppose I’ll hear their decision at our scheduled meeting next week—” During my honeymoon. “—but they haven’t told me and I can’t help you further now.”

I knew that tone. Polite, but firm.

I left the office without an argument, and walked down the side street toward the courthouse parking lot. I was almost to my SUV when I stopped.

A scene replayed in my head from before talking to James.

Jay Haus coming around the corner from the direction of the sheriff’s department. Blowing past me like he didn’t see me.

Reminding me of something . . . something to do with Sergeant Jardos.

Got it.

I heard Connie’s voice in my head.

Why I thought something was bothering him was his expression when he walked right by me. Must have been Monday. That was the day I was at the courthouse to file papers for Burrell Roads. I was nearly to my truck in the parking lot. He’d come from the side street, and had actually passed me . . .

* * * *

I pivoted and hurried back to the law office on the side street, swinging open the door, and surprising the young receptionist.

I disarmed her with “I’ll just—”

And bypassed her, still at full speed, to knock once on James’ door and go in.

“James, what did Frank Jardos come here to see you about early last week?”

“I can’t—”

“He’s dead—”

“Not officially.”

He was right. That didn’t mean I had to fold. “I’ll tell Shelton.”

He stared at me a moment, then we both laughed at the I’ll-tell-Mom echo.

“But, seriously, I will tell him,” I said. “Jardos can’t be a client of yours, not with you being the mediator, facilitator, whatever you want to call it, between the vets and the museum — unless it’s an entirely different matter.”

“As a matter of fact, he asked for detailed information on how registered agents work.”

I stifled the what? that wanted to arise and replaced it with, “And what are the details of how they work?”

Even as I asked the question, another bell went off in my head. I’d read something . . . Something connected with . . . cocktails?

That didn’t seem right, but—

“Elizabeth, I’ll tell you exactly what I told him. I know little about that and I am not comfortable beyond saying that you should look at the official Wyoming state website for your information.”