Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

“Come on, please. We can make Harry behave. You will get the chance to push anti-crime. Sookie wants you to be a regular, to come on at least once a week for whatever story we’ve got going on. Harry does what we tell him. He doesn’t even know the topic till he gets to the studio each day. And that’s just thirty minutes before air, just enough time for hair and makeup. He couldn’t care less what we do. If he had his way, we’d do sports every night, seven days a week.”

“I believe it. I saw you did another show on Liberace last week, How can he do the same thing over and over? I mean, Liberace? How long has he been dead?”

“The viewers love it! They absolutely love Liberace. They love the old clips of him, especially when we show him meeting Elvis; then there’s Liberace in the white mink cape, and oh… the clips of Liberace and his mother… They love it!”

“So I’m just lumped in with Liberace, the next freak in Sookie’s menagerie? Tell me something, Tony. Why do you do this? Why do you put up with being an errand boy for Sookie, taking her crap?”

He sat quietly for a moment before answering. “Hailey, when I was a kid, I had nobody. Both my parents worked all the time, I was alone so much… I guess I watched too much TV, and I fell in love with it. When I was lonely or afraid of being at the house by myself or of the bully at school, I escaped into the TV. It was like magic, I could be somewhere else… be someone else. My whole life, I wanted to make TV and now I am. I run one of the highest-rated shows on air, even though I don’t get the credit. It makes me somebody .”

His answer struck Hailey as genuine, but sad in a way. She understood a lot more about Tony Russo now.

“And Sookie thinks you’re authentic, that the viewers like you because you stand for something. I guess. What is it exactly that you stand for? You know, that’d be a great banner on the lower third of the screen when you’re on… what it is you stand for…”

“Okay, I have to go.” Hailey put down a twenty for her salad and tea.

Tony looked up. “I think I feel nauseous. That waitress definitely spit in my food. Oh, and I don’t have any cash.” Shaking her head, Hailey pulled out another twenty to cover Tony’s lunch and lifted the sweater off the back of her chair. Russo somehow managed to get between her ribs and her elbow so as to intertwine his arm in hers.

“Just think about it, please? Look, I know you like me. This will do more to fight crime than anything else you could ever do. More than trying one thug after the next in some dingy little courthouse.”

“The courthouse is not dingy.” She snapped it back.

Actually, he was right. She just didn’t want to admit it. The courthouse where she prosecuted was horribly dingy. The carpet was frayed in the halls, the marbled floors in the courtrooms themselves had long lost their luster, the wooden pew-style benches were worn and smooth. But, at that moment, she could feel it, smell it, breathe the courtroom again. Only there, striking a jury or cracking questions like a whip during a cross-exam of a defense witness, or whispering the final words to a closing argument, did she feel she fit in her own skin, like a bird out of a cage.

Tony went on. “Hailey, just hear me out. We have an emergency. We need you. Please, please come on today. We’ll work around your schedule. The Love story… It’s incredible! She’s dead! ”

“Yes. I know. You told me. Let me guess… You love it! Right?”

“What?” Russo didn’t understand her gentle jab at him. He was oblivious, and Hailey didn’t bother to explain.

“But what’s the emergency?”

“Well, we’re running the Love interview. It’s gonna be fantastic. We’ll work in video from the murder scene. We can’t get any of the cops to talk… That’s where you come in. We need the voice of Lady Justice. All we have right now is the lawyer who’s representing Love’s family. Leather Stockton’s, too. Both of them. Sookie’s so amazing! She personally booked their lawyer, Derek Jacobs.”

Hailey recognized the name. Jacobs was a famous celebrity lawyer who managed to bungle every case he handled, but somehow maintained a high profile. Apparently, the stars just heard about the Who’s Who list of his clients, never thinking deeply enough to notice he always lost the case.

“He’s a sleaze bucket. Why do the families have a lawyer?”

“They’re suing, of course!”

Hailey paused. “Suing who?

Tony nearly exploded at the suggestion there was no one to sue. “Are you kidding? They were murdered and cops don’t have the killers yet! Can’t the families sue the cops? Aren’t they taking too long to solve the case? Or the yoga studio for poor lighting? I mean… There’s gotta be somebody to sue… right?”

“No… there’s not a lawsuit there against the cops and I don’t know what lighting had to do with Prentiss Love’s murder… probably nothing. Murder constitutes a criminal intervening act and a civil lawsuit probably won’t hold up.”

“See… I love it when you talk like a lawyer! We have to do the show in a hurry! Before they catch the killers!”

Or killer, Hailey thought.

“I’m not a civil lawyer; it’s really not my expertise. I was a prosecutor.” But that was another life… a life she left behind. All of it. The bloody crime scenes. The late night phone calls. The heavy case loads, the autopsies, those horrible stainless steel tables, covered with a sheet of white paper to catch the human decomp as it oozed from the bodies of dead victims… It was over.

They stepped out onto the sidewalk. Instinctively looking past Tony Russo for a cab as he continued talking, Hailey spotted two Park Avenue types, stick-thin skinny with hair perfectly coiffed to fall in shiny waves around their heads, skin-tight pants, and high heels. Both faces looked stretched unnaturally across the eyes, noses, and foreheads, their makeup was perfect… and their dogs were having a vicious fight on the sidewalk. A fight as vicious as two tiny Manhattan maltipoos could muster. The women were trying their best to pull the dogs apart by their leashes without chipping any nails.

Both the dogs were wearing miniature mink jackets that fitted over their torsos and came just short of their short little silky legs.

Mink jackets? For dogs?

This was horribly unnatural. She could only pray the two doggie jackets were faux. Maybe coming back to the city had been a mistake after all.

“Anyway, you don’t want to do an hour show to fight for justice, but you have no idea what I’ve had to live through for the show. I just got back from a trip to DC. Miserable! Travel booked me in what I was told was a five-star hotel, The Pentagonian, and guess what happened?”

“What happened?” She dragged her eyes away from maltipoos in minks and looked back at Tony.

“Well, of course I was booked on the Elite Club Level.”

“What’s the Club Level? ”

He looked at her like she was an alien from another planet. “The Club Level is where the hotel has an open bar, food, TVs, magazines… a hospitality room for frequent guests, you know, or people that shell out premium rates for the rooms.”

He looked put out having to explain what a Club Level was.

“ Anyway, ” he continued on, “of course I had to be moved to a room at the very end of the hall because I just am not going to put up with the elevator opening and shutting at all hours of the day and night, people laughing and talking in the halls… Were they crazy?”

“They had to be crazy.” Hailey egged him on.

“So then, when I get into my room, I just felt nauseous from all the travel and I went into my bathroom and there, hanging on the back of the bathroom door was this thick, white terrycloth robe with slippers attached…”