The Rosary Girls by Richard Montanari Page A

entertainment, Tristan Chaffee, was wearing a shiny tux, his tie down, his feet up, a glass of white Zinfandel in his hand. He was working on a story about a local celebrity—an overrated singer of syrupy love songs, a low-rent Bobby Vinton—who had apparently been caught in a child porn sting.
    Simon pushed his broom, covertly watching the two men work. The serious journalist pored over obscure details of land plots and abstracts and eminent domain rights, rubbing his eyes, butting out long-ashed cigarette after cigarette, forgetting to smoke them, making frequent trips to the loo to drain what must have been a pea-sized bladder.
    And then there was the entertainment hack, sipping sweet wine, chatting on the phone with record producers, club owners, groupies.
The decision made itself.
Sod the hard news, Simon had thought.
Gimme the white Zin.
At eighteen, Simon enrolled at the Luzerne County Community College. A year after graduation, Aunt Iris passed silently in her sleep. Simon packed his few belongings and moved to Philly, at long last loping after his dream (that being, becoming the British Joe Queenan). For three years he lived on his small inheritance, trying to sell his freelance articles to the major national glossies, with no luck.
Then, after three more years of writing freelance music and film reviews for the Inquirer and Daily News, and eating his share of ramen noodles and hot ketchup soup, Simon landed a feature job at a new start-up tabloid called The Report . He worked his way up quickly, and for the past seven years Simon Close had written a weekly discourse of his own design called “Up Close!,” a rather lurid crime beat column that covered the city of Philadelphia’s more shocking crimes and, when he was so blessed, the transgressions of its more luminous citizens. In these areas Philadelphia rarely disappointed.
And while his venue at The Report —the conscience of philadelphia read the tag—was not the Inquirer or The Daily News or even CityPaper, Simon had managed to file near the top of the news cycle on a number of big stories, much to the consternation of his far-better-paid colleagues in the so-called legitimate press.
So-called because, according to Simon Close, there was no such thing as the legitimate press. They were all knee deep in the cesspool, every hack with a spiral-bound notebook and acid reflux disease, and the ones who considered themselves solemn chroniclers of their times were seriously deluded. Connie Chung spending a week shadowing Tonya Harding and the “reporters” from Entertainment Tonight covering the JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson cases were all the blur one needed.
Since when were dead little girls entertainment?
Since serious news was flushed down the toilet with an O. J. chaser, that’s when.
Simon was proud of his work at The Report . He had good instincts and an almost photographic memory for quotes and details. He had been front and center on the story of the homeless man found in North Philly, his internal organs removed from his body, as well as the scene of the crime. On that one, Simon had bribed a night technician at the medical examiner’s office with a joint of Thai stick for an autopsy photo, which, unfortunately, never saw the ink of print.
He had beaten the Inquirer to print on a scandal at the police department about a homicide detective who had hounded a man to suicide after the murder of the young man’s parents, a crime of which the young man was innocent.
He’d even had a cover story on a recent adoption scam where a South Philly woman, owner of a shadow agency called Loving Hearts, was taking thousands of dollars for phantom children she never delivered. Although he would have preferred a higher body count in his stories, and grislier photos, he was nominated for an AAN award for “Phantom Hearts,” as that adoption scam piece had been called.
Philadelphia Magazine had also run an exposé on the woman—a full month after Simon’s