Murder at The Washington Tribune by Margaret Truman Page A

I’m sure you agree. You obviously took these pictures with love. It shows.”
    He thought the young man would cry again, but he didn’t. “Sure, go ahead and take one,” he said.
    â€œI like this one,” Wilcox said, carefully removing the photo from the first page. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “She’s beautiful.”
    Wilcox stood and extended his hand. “I’d better be going,” he said. “You’ve been very generous with your time, Philip, and I don’t want to wear out my welcome. May I call you again if I have further questions?”
    â€œThat’ll be okay. Do you have any idea when we’ll be able to have a funeral for Colleen? Her mom and sister keep asking about that.”
    â€œIt’ll be a while, I’m afraid,” Wilcox replied. “When a death is the result of a homicide, the police need to keep the body for a period of time. Here’s my card, Philip. Call any time. I’d like to help.”
    â€œThanks. I appreciate that, Mr. Wilcox.”
    â€œAnd please express my condolences to Colleen’s mother and sister and other family members. I may try and talk with them in a day or two, once the shock is past.”
    Wilcox went to his car and dropped down into the driver’s seat. While talking with Connor, he’d suffered the same mild lightheadedness and vague nausea he’d experienced when interviewing Jean Kaporis’s roommate, Mary Jane Pruit. He rested his head against the seat’s back and closed his eyes until the feeling passed, and spent the next few minutes making descriptive notes about the apartment to use in the article.
    He knew he’d taken advantage of Connor’s vulnerability. The young man was obviously a naÏf, his lack of worldliness evident. There had been instances in Wilcox’s journalistic career when he’d backed off in deference to the grieving, and had paid the price for that sensitivity by losing some of the emotionally charged aspects of those stories. But he’d operated under his own set of values, and hadn’t regretted it.

    Tabloid journalism had always been anathema to him, and he’d promised himself that if he couldn’t work for a mainstream paper, a newspaper respected for its integrity, he’d find another line of work. He’d held true to that pledge. The problem was, he felt, journalism had violated
his
principles.
    He’d seen it happen at the
Tribune.
As circulation dropped off, along with advertising revenues, standards had slipped, too. The almighty bottom line became increasingly powerful; the choice of stories, and the way they were treated, mirrored what had become an almost insatiable drive to return profits to the paper’s shareholders. Yes,
The Washington Tribune
had retained respectability through its coverage of national and world events, particularly politics. The
Trib,
along with
The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe,
Cleveland
Plain Dealer,
his former employer, the
Detroit Free Press,
and others, had managed to avoid all but a trace of overt capitulation to base public tastes, which seemed to prefer daily doses of dirt from the celebrity murder trial du jour, the sexual escapades of elected officials, and titillating tales of show-business debauchery.
    But his level of disdain for tabloid journalism had slowly but surely begun to evaporate—or wasn’t there to begin with—along with Underwood typewriters, green eyeshades, and gruff, hard-nosed reporters yelling, “Copy boy!” and “Stop the presses!” New blood at the
Trib,
like the bumptious Hawthorne, carried with them their shallow, one-dimensional view of the world. He knew how they viewed him—an anachronism, a square, over-the-hill hack who’d lost touch with their sadly depleted, morally bankrupt world. Were he writing editorials for the paper, he would write