Deal.

Other than maybe “bad guy,” one little four-letter word seems to pop up most often in law enforcement.

“Deal.”

It’s like the scene in “Donnie Brasco” where Johnny Depp runs through all the different permutations of “fuggedaboutit.” “Deal” can mean nearly anything.

“Hey, would you hand me that deal?” Maybe it’s a camera, a pair of rubber gloves, handcuffs, a clipboard.

“It’s like that deal last year at 18th and Pike.” An arrest, perhaps, maybe a homicide or a crazy domestic call.

“Let’s go do that deal.” That could be serving a warrant, checking for a suspect at his mama’s house, meeting at a favorite place for lunch.

“What’s your deal?” Pretty much self-explanatory, but meaning can vary with tone.

With each, context will most likely provide the answer. If not, just smile and nod and say, “Good deal.”

2,000.

At some point yesterday, I got the 2,000th pageview on this little site. As of this morning I was at 2,022.

That’s kind of trippy. I mean, I write for a newspaper that still very much thinks of itself as a newspaper. I never get much of an idea how many people read anything I write.

So for those of you enjoying this experiment of mine, I’m much obliged. To the rest of y’all, thanks at the least for stopping by.

Stubborn, persistent, whatever.

It’s a little triumph. I’ll give you that.

Not long after I started this job, the largest police department in the state began shipping certain prisoners — nonviolent repeat offenders, mostly — across the county line where there was room in the jail. The jail here couldn’t take them — too full. So the department agreed to pay the neighboring county $30 a day per prisoner.

I’d been here just a few months. I wrote a profile of the first dude sent out.

It never ran. Even now I’m not entirely sure why. I could guess, but the Internet’s probably not the place to do that out loud.

Still. I kept my story drafts, my notes, my file full of records. Didn’t know what I’d ever do with them, precisely, but I got a feeling I’d have another opportunity to write about my dude.

Here we are two years later. My dude was back out of prison — but back in jail and, interestingly, back in that neighboring county’s jail under the same program he inaugurated. I remembered him, certainly. And so did my editor, who was an advocate for my original story.

We thought this might be the right time. It was. The story ran on the front page, the only staff story there that day.

I admit it. I did a little dance. Surreal as hell to see a lede on the front page I originally wrote two years ago.

As my man Vin Scully might say, a small thing, but thine own.

++ DOUBLE UPDATE: So, wow. The executive editor got back from vacation and told me he has his secretary FedEx him the papers from when he was gone so he can read them on the way back. He brought me into his office just to tell me how much the story stood out and how much he enjoyed it. Cool thing.

++UPDATE: So, yes, I’m a journalism dork, as we have established. I asked for and got the press plates for Page One the day this story ran.

My wee trophy:

.

Incredible. Almost.

If you have any interest at all in the ways justice can elude people, read this.

Please.

1887.

Sometimes it’s better not to wait.

A regular source of mine mentioned a letter his office got from a national organization for cops killed in the line of duty. The group was trying to research two names to see whether they belonged on a national memorial. The two men died in 1887.

My dude gave me a copy of the letter and a few short newspaper items from around the country that mention the men’s deaths. His office hadn’t found anything, but maybe my newspaper’s archives might have something.

I suppose I could have looked around a little and passed along what I found, then waited for some movement on their cases to write a story. But I had a different idea: Why not research the deaths myself, see what I could find or prove, then write a story about how we did the research. Sort of a meta story.

Every time I read one of those stories about long-dead cops getting recognized, there’s rarely anything in there about how, exactly, people found what they found. I thought our readers might be kind of interested.

So I started simply. The men worked in Grant County. I called the sheriff, who never heard of them, and a local history museum. I also found a couple clips in our archives. Based on the little bit I found in those places, I checked Census records, personal property tax records, probate and criminal court records, election records — anything I could find that might tell me a little more about who these men were and how they died.

What I was looking for was at least 122 years old. Not all of what I wanted still existed. But I found enough.

These two men aren’t listed on the state’s memorial either. But now, with this story and the research behind it, they might be. A cool little thing, that.

Hard news.

That last post got me thinking. A few people have suggested that in addition to many of the stories I tossed up on this site, I make sure to add at least a few articles with straight ledes just to show that I can do those, too.

(Cough*clickthelinks*cough.)

See what I did there? Story vs. Article. The editor of the long-gone Arkansas Gazette — he was in the job 70 years and died in 1972 at age 100 — used to admonish reporters who wanted to write stories, saying that term left too much room for fiction, while an article provided only fact.

I don’t know about that. That seems an archaic way to describe it.

Some stories want to be told certain ways. Others are flexible. The style of the lede could well determine whether anyone bothers to continue with the paragraphs that follow. A writer should have some sense of which way to go.

The lede to me, however, doesn’t determine whether a story is hard news or not. You can write hard news with a soft touch. There are stories that seem to require it.

Yet a straight lede is a crucial tool for a writer. Not every story must — or even wants — to be a story.

It’s interesting to me because my paper is the most old-school shop I’ve ever worked in. Most of what we write has straight ledes. The ability to write something else has to be earned over time. It took me about a year here to get even a little bit of latitude, if not the benefit of the doubt.

Still. Sometimes journalism is best as a blunt instrument.

‘Keep telling stories.’

As I try to sort out where I am in this business, while still trying to get better at what I do, I sent out a few e-mails last week — some to people who might not even remember me — asking them to take a look at some of my work.

One of them is an editor at one of the largest and best newspapers in the country. He has a reputation as being a truly incredible editor. Anything he could offer be would be a gift.

Strangely, he wrote me back. (The best in this business are generally quite kind in my experience.) He read a few things of mine on this site, had a few nice things to say. Made a few suggestions I have taken to heart.

Then he gave me this: “Keep telling stories. That’s the thing I admire about the work I saw.”

Now, let’s stop and acknowledge that “admire” is a word into which I should read nothing. OK? OK.

But the simple idea there is one I sometimes get too far away from. I always want to make a story better, tell it the way it wants to be told. Sometimes I try too hard to do that.

At the same time, almost any story is better when the story of it doesn’t get lost. The beginning-middle-end of it, the humanity of it. Those stories become like annotated, illustrated reality. There’s power in that — to bring people together, to change things, to take people places they would never otherwise go.

I’m grateful for the reminder.

50 years.

One of the things I like about being a beat reporter is finding out little things — small facts — that become whole stories with a little context.

There’s a sergeant in North Little Rock who is about to hit his 50th anniversary with the department. Far as anyone can tell, that’s some kind of record in Arkansas.

No one sent out a press release about it. No one mentioned it to me as a story. I just heard he was retiring.

I made some calls and asked a couple helpful people in the department to talk to him as see if he’d sit for an interview or two. He’s the kind of guy who at a crime scene would back out of a photographer’s shot. A bit gruff, not too friendly to reporters.

I made a few more calls to see if I could really show anybody reading this story just how rare a thing his longevity — especially with one department — is. One executive director of a national police organization couldn’t think of anyone. Another gave me the name of someone who might be able to think of a name. Both of them were in awe at this guy.

And that’s the thing. He’s just a guy. Never intended to stay this long, just sort of did. To call him, say, the institution within the institution is a bit grandiose and builds him up more than he needs or deserves. And to do that is not to do anyone justice.

Saying something.

Sometimes the best quotes come right after a person says they won’t talk to you.

We broke the story that police charged a former Little Rock Zoo cashier with stealing money from three schools’ field-trip cash. She posted bond and was out of jail by the time I heard about her arrest. I tracked down a cell number for her and called her.

The first call was brief. Told her who I was and asked her to explain what happened. Her answer: “No.” Then she hung up.

So I called her right back to explain that I was writing a story about this and talking to me was an opportunity to avoid it being a one-sided piece. She was indignant.

“Did I ask you to write a story about that?” she said. “I don’t think so. I ain’t got nothing to say to you, so you can quit calling me on my phone or else I’ll say that’s harassment.”

That’s what I put in the story.

When the paper came out the next day, my wife read the story and walked around for part of the morning laughing and repeating, “Did I ask you to write a story about that? I don’t think so.” At work, one of the copy editors, who usually has a very dry sense of humor and is not given to dramatic recital, walked by my desk and did the same thing in a goofy voice. Twice.

If that weren’t enough, the executive editor stopped by. Thankfully for both of us he didn’t try to say the line in a funny way. (He’s not that kind of guy.) But he told me how much he appreciated having that quote in the story — verisimilitude, a respite from newspaperese, all that jazz.

“Don’t ever lose that eye,” he told me.

I don’t know. I guess I can’t help finding it amusing that the part of the story everyone remembered was the “no comment” part.

Even more amusing to me was that it wasn’t even my favorite quote in the story. When I called the teacher who by asking for a receipt started this whole thing rolling, I asked her if she had ever helped the police make an arrest before.

“No comment,” she said.

I said, OK, what about helping police arrest someone who wasn’t a student? Now I was really curious. I wasn’t expecting her to say, “No comment.”

“No comment,” she said again. “But my ex-husband is in law-enforcement.”

Details.

Man. Yesterday was one of those strange days.

I was covering the same story everyone else in town was covering — a break-in in a granite-lined mausoleum inside a Catholic cemetery. But as happens sometimes, I started to get more absorbed in the details than in the larger story once it became clear the cops didn’t have much and the diocese didn’t have much to say.

I had the names of the people whose remains were disturbed. So did everyone else. They were in the police report. So I started going through our obit archives trying to find out who they were. One had owned an amusement park. Another was a manufacturing executive. A third had been a reporter and editor for years at the defunct Arkansas Gazette.

And then I saw something interesting. In the obit for the former president of a masonry and construction firm, where it listed his children, was someone with the same name as one of Little Rock’s assistant police chiefs. I don’t know that chief well enough to know his parents names, but damn if the picture of the deceased doesn’t look at least a little bit like him.

I left him a message. He called back. Didn’t want to talk for an interview, but wanted to give me the courtesy of confirming the information: Those were his parents whose vaults were broken into.

This became my favorite detail of the day. It was also one I knew no one else had.

Of course, this meant I had to sit on it for a good long while. See, most of the time, my paper pretends there’s no Internet. Unless something massive or incredibly dramatic happens — a vicious tornado, say, or Bill Clinton self-immolating in front of the Paula Jones hotel — we just hang back and write for the paper the next day. Suggestions that we do otherwise, even for competitive reasons, are generally met with mild grumpiness at a minimum.

So unless I wanted to walk around the newsroom and maybe a couple of nearby streets downtown telling people my little detail over and over again like a 6-year-old at a grown-folks dinner party — which I considered — I just had to hope no one else figured it out in the 16 hours before the paper hit doorsteps.

Success! Well, this time, anyway. When I woke up this morning, there my little detail was in all its newsprinty glory. Nobody else had it. Then I could savor my coffee instead of cussing a little in between sips.

If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

I was in the middle of something else. Phone calls, reading reports — my mind was in a different place.

Usually when the phone rings at my desk and I don’t recognize the name or number, the conversation goes one of three ways.

1. It’s a crazy person. I need to be polite, but I need to run away as fast as I can. Sometimes this doesn’t happen quickly. (Yes, I’m talking about you, lady who called about the “box of murder” she found in her house.)

2. It’s someone who didn’t get their paper. Here’s the number for circulation, have a nice day.

3. It’s someone who wants to talk about a topic or a part of the state I don’t cover. Let me transfer you to the state editor/appropriate reporter/obit clerk/whatever.

This was not one of those calls. On the other end of the phone was a police officer I’d never met. His department had a big shootout — a five-hour standoff — with a suspect last year. He was in the middle of it.

I’d heard a rumor that a few officers either quit or had some personal issues afterward but couldn’t nail it down. People left, sure, but no one would confirm the reason. I’d tried to get in touch with this guy months earlier but never had any luck. I’d all but forgotten about it.

This officer had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by four doctors. He wasn’t working and wasn’t getting paid. His workers’ comp claim was denied. Then his chief threatened to discipline him when he wouldn’t see a fifth doctor the department chose.

He was willing to talk to me exclusively — something I asked for if we continued. Was I interested?

First thing, I had him fax me copies of some of his documents — letters from the four doctors, the denial letter from workers’ comp, a couple other things. It was just enough to know I had something but not enough to get him too excited or burden him.

Then I talked to my editor, who gave me the green light to pursue a story.

But I still didn’t know whether the story would be one officer’s experiences or more than that, a piece that tracked a number of officers in the year since the shootout.

I went to his department and read through the statements all the officers wrote after the shootout. At the least, I had to confirm that this officer was where he was at the time he said he was there. Really I wanted to get more names, find more people to talk to who were there and to know more of the story of what happened that day. Maybe my officer was a sidebar. Maybe he was a main story and other officers were a sidebar. Maybe neither. I didn’t know yet.

I tried to contact a number of others. Most weren’t interested in talking about it. By then, I’d met with my officer and his attorney and gotten more documents, including the chief’s letter discussing discipline.

I also did everything I could to make sure this officer was who he said he was. I called old bosses at previous jobs going back years. I read through his nine-year-old divorce file. I checked his personnel file for commendation letters and discipline.

The pieces fit. He seemed to be who he said he was. I could verify almost every last detail he gave me.

All of that shaped the story.

I spoke to the chief who wouldn’t meet me in person and all but hung up on me as soon as he found out some of the questions I wanted answered. I talked to the workers’ comp folks who told me they couldn’t understand exactly why the officer’s claim was denied — they needed to gather more information.

The day the story ran, the department postponed an administrative hearing to talk discipline for the officer. I got word that workers’ comp was re-examining his claim.

The officer was ecstatic. People I know at other agencies — line officers and sergeants, mostly — went out of their way to shake my hand and say thanks when I saw them. That never happens.

And I was reminded of why I do this for a living.

Getting back into this.

So I realize I’ve let this thing languish a bit. Time to get back to it. I’ll have some new posts up later this evening, I think. Some stuff I’ve been tossing around in my head that I’d like to share.

Until then.

Memorial Day.

No one could have been happier than me that my Memorial Day assignment got rained out. The governor of Arkansas, apparently, doesn’t like mud and so canceled his appearance and speech at a veterans’ cemetery.

The downside of all this is it left me without a Memorial Day story.

I talked to a few people at the cemetery the governor was supposed to go to. Just the usual. Nothing special or unexpected.

So I left. More than anything, I wanted to avoid the whole talk-to-three-families-and-go-home-and-write-13-inches thing. I doubt people even really read that stuff, editors included. Anyway, I could go to any cemetery and get that story, so meantime I could stick that in my pocket for emergencies and go after something I’d rather do.

I went next to the oldest cemetery in Little Rock, where the luminous of the state’s past lie not far from a freeway and a Sonic. Little Rock, bless your heart. Mount Holly Cemetery. Some of those buried there are old Confederate soldiers, not to mention David O. Dodd, famous as the “boy martyr of the Confederacy.” (It’s a long story.) I thought it might be interesting to see if any Sons of the Confederacy or recent descendants left anything for them on Memorial Day. Maybe there would be a story there.

Short answer: No.

Two cemeteries down. Still no story.

Then I went to the Little Rock National Cemetery. It’s on Confederate Boulevard. I’ve stopped asking questions about things like this.

Almost immediately when I pulled in, I saw these two guys in work uniforms carrying the sorts of flags you usually only see as an Olympic marathon jogs by. I asked them what they were doing. Turns out they were the only two cemetery caretakers working that day, both veterans, and were tasked with keeping flags clean and upright in front of every gravesite in the place.

I smiled to myself thinking about Jimmy Breslin’s legendary piece on JFK’s gravedigger and knowing I’m not that good. But at least I’d found my story.

How things work.

I meant to write about this a while ago and put it off for too long. So here it is now.

In Arkansas — more than anywhere else I’ve worked — public officials really don’t like explaining themselves. If they made a decision, it should stand because, well, they made the decision — and how offensive that you would ask why.

That’s what I ran into on this story. Not for the first time, sure. But this seemed like as good a case as any for a public servant to help a reading public understand where he was coming from because it isn’t fully obvious on its face.

Hints, guesses, theories — those are all that are left in the information vacuum. And those tend to be less flattering, often, than the truth.

It’s a generalization, but it’s one inspired by my two years here and the hundreds of bylines, contributing tags and unsigned briefs I’ve had published. There are exceptions. Notable ones. But as a matter of course, this is what reporters run into again and again.

So the answer came, as expected: No. Not going to explain myself. Figure it out for yourself. And why would you even ask?

Two years.

Yesterday was my second anniversary at this newspaper. It was also the last day for the guy who I succeeded working cops, who had been here 18 years in a number of different assignments, many of them law-enforcement related.

Yay for symmetry. Or something.

When they hired me here, they’d had some serious turnover on the cops beat. Day shift, night shift, churn, churn, churn. Nobody had lasted more than a year or so in a long time.

I remember during my interviews here an editor asking me, “Are you really sure you want to do cops? Because we want a cops reporter. You’re not going to come to us in nine months and say you want to cover the Capitol?”

What I said in response still holds true: “Not until you start having stabbings there.”

Things have gone well. I’ve gotten better. And they seem to like my work. I got this e-mail from the executive editor: “Congratulations on your second anniversary at this newspaper. You have a lot of talent.”

There’s still a bit more scanner-chasing than I’d like, but it helps keep me sharp. There is rarely a day when I don’t write something, be it a brief, an 11-inch story or something longer for a section-front or the front page. I find that useful.

But I’ve been thinking lately. Some kind of beat associated with law-enforcement is decidedly my preference. But for the right job in the right city, I think I’d be open to trying something else. I’m curious how my cop-reporting chops might translate to covering something different.

Trouble is, I still really like writing about law enforcement.

Enough ruminating for now. This is where I am. This is where whatever comes next will find me.