I was walking around the oval track at Lewiston High School in the dead of night. It was misty and cool, and the stadium lights made everyone look ghostly. I was lost in thought when the woman approached me from the grass. She walked onto the oval at a slant and it was clear she was heading in my direction. This is it, I thought. The assassin.

“Are you Mark LaFlamme?”

I hate that question. The first impulse is to lie. No, madam. The name is Cady. Max Cady, from the Carolinas. Then I remembered I hadn’t committed any major felonies lately and decided to fess up.

The woman hadn’t tracked me down to arrest or shoot me. She had angry words to fire instead of bullets. At issue this night was a column I’d written months ago about the passing of a valued source. The woman on the track took exception to kind words I had written about the departed.

“I wonder how well you really knew her,” she said, with hands on her hips.

She was talking about Brenda, and it was a fair question. How well had I really known the boisterous, hard-drinking street urchin who came to personify downtown Lewiston? What did I know, beyond the prostitution, the crack dealing, the ravages of a booze-soaked life?

The woman before me was irate. In my column, I had portrayed Brenda as a hard-living street lady with a heart of gold. She loved animals. She took care of sickly old men. She was as loyal to friends as she was to her liquor habit and I never saw her intentionally hurt anyone.

All of those things were true. But the woman on the oval track happened to know one of Brenda’s forgotten children. And that boy did not see any gold gleaming in the heart of the mother who had abandoned him.

I don’t know how many children Brenda delivered during her whirlwind existence. I know she had a son just before she died because she had shown me a photo. It was a part of her life I didn’t know. There were many parts like that.

The woman on the oval thought it was shameful that I had written about the life of Brenda with reflective fondness. Others tended to agree. Police who dealt with her over the years thought the headline: “Twin Cities Sweetheart dead at 31” was a bit of melodrama.

I regret nothing about the writing of that column, though. Brenda left behind a trail of chaos and disorder, it’s true. But the fact is, I was not the only person who saw through the gin blossoms and the drunken sneer to the glimmer of humanity beneath. For all the loudness and turmoil, Brenda had enough charisma to wrap around the planet.

She had been an outstanding source. She knew everyone and every bit of tasty gossip moving through the streets like a flu. She could make sense of the intricate web of players who skitter through the local world of crime and chaos.

I spent weekends trying to live her lifestyle and found myself spent at the end of it. There are those who can run marathons or drive golf balls 300 yards. There are those who can exist in a world filled with vice and corruption and somehow thrive.

My, how the readers react when a news organization profiles a person perceived to be a denizen of the subculture. We chronicled a crack addict several months ago and the uproar was immediate and furious. Why give space and ink to these parasites of society?, they demanded. Why glorify a disgusting and immoral existence?

It’s the same when we write about ex-cons, homeless people, chronic alcoholics or someone spending his life in a prison jumpsuit. Some readers regard those people as self-pitying leeches and condemn the reporter for producing the story.

The woman on the track had a point. I had written a windy diatribe about the life and times of a crack addict and former prostitute, somehow ignoring the pain she had caused to the children she had abandoned.

But I also wrote that piece as honestly as I could and from the only perspective I had. People will always disagree about some of the subjects reporters write about. But if we choose to ignore the shabby and sinful in favor of the shiny and successful, some of the best stories will never be told. And a dim part of the population will never be illuminated.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. Visit his blog at www.sunjournal.com.