Nancy Grace: Death on the D-List

It was a brilliant Sunday morning and she’d been running over an hour when she unexpectedly came upon the park exit leading to the Plaza Hotel. At a distance, she saw a gold-plated statute, high up on a pedestal, shiny and glittering in the sun. It was one of the largest around. Wondering who deserved such glory, she stopped running and walked up to see it.

It turned out to be a shrine erected to William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union general responsible for literally burning a wide, sweeping swath of a path through the South, including the city of Atlanta, during the Civil War. The destruction of country so beautiful-carried out not to win the war, but out of pure joy at the South’s devastation-remained a dagger in the hearts of many Southerners to the present day.

“Driver’s license, ID” An old, gray GNE security guard repeated the phrase by rote without looking up from behind a long, glossy bleached wood counter.

Fishing through the deep leather purse hanging on her shoulder, Hailey pulled out her old District Attorney’s badge, cased in a worn wallet holder. From behind the shiny gold badge, she pulled her Georgia driver’s license and held it over the counter for the guard to inspect. He took it from her hand and began copying the information down on a sign-in sheet. Looking around, Hailey noticed several well-dressed security guards strategically placed throughout the lobby. They all wore blue sports coats with gray pants, with nearly invisible earpieces in their ears.

“Hailey Dean, Hailey Dean. That name rings a bell.” He looked up at her and then lowered his glasses to peer at her over their upper rims. “Right. I remember you. I read all about you in the Post , saw you on the TV too. That nut-job lawyer almost did you in, but you got him good. Right in the head. Dentist drill, right? Man I’d like to do it to my lawyer. Made my divorce worse than the old lady did. Almost called the divorce off just to get rid of the lawyer!”

The last thing she wanted to talk about was the night she was nearly murdered. She remembered the feel of Leonard’s hair, slicked back as always, when her hand, clutching the buzzing dentist drill, slammed into his temple. She never remembered actually turning the thing on.

Funny how little details like that can bug you for the longest time.

Hailey managed a smile, telling herself the security guard’s heart was in the right place.

“Yep. Hailey Dean. Right in the head with a dentist drill. Wonder if the dentist used that drill again. He shoulda framed it. Right?”

Before Hailey had to come up with a response, she heard her name screeched out across the large expanse of the GNE lobby floor.

“Hailey! Hailey Dee-e-an! You made it! You’re so much smaller than you look on TV! I thought you were at least five feet ten! I just love it! ”

IT HAD TO BE TONY RUSSO. SHE’D RECOGNIZE THAT VOICE ANYWHERE. IT had been in her ear for hours on end for months. The Jersey accent had actually grown on her, but this was the first time she could attach a face to the voice on the phone.

She had imagined someone tall, dressed in a suit, businesslike, maybe like an on-air anchor. He couldn’t be more different. Barely topping five-feet-six, he was dressed in a baggy pair of low-rider jeans working their way down. Fashion “trends” were not for everyone, and with that in mind, Hailey didn’t want to see Tony’s other side.

The show’s host, Harry Todd, was Tony’s polar opposite. Todd had to be in his late fifties despite insisting, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary, that he was only thirty. He’d undergone every plastic surgery procedure known to man and doggedly followed every trend to stay young. His current stab at youth was spiking his highlighted hair straight up in the middle, stiff with gel, like a mohawk. Ego aside, he was the undisputed star of daytime talk.

Somehow, Todd garnered a huge share of the daytime market and not only managed to hang on for nearly twenty years, but was still perceived as a ratings monster, and nobody dared suggest otherwise. GNE would go right down the crapper without Todd as the tent pole holding up the daytime numbers.

And Anthony Russo was Todd’s chief booker.

Russo booked Martha Stewart on Harry Todd straight out of jail and even got her to wear the famous green poncho she knitted behind bars. He got Brad and Angelina, and every sitting president since Reagan.

The show was executive-produced by a female power broker by the name of Sookie Downs. Downs had come up through the network and landed at the helm of the biggest daytime talk show in the industry. She ran the show with an iron fist from her mansion somewhere in the Hamptons, literally smack in the middle of an apple orchard.

Rarely making the trek into the city, she relied on her henchman, Tony Russo, to hold the show together and do her bidding. He carried a private cell phone on his hip at all times so they could stay in constant contact. Right now, Russo looked Hailey straight in the eyes. “You’re so beautiful. I had no idea! Do people just come up to you on the street and say ‘You’re beautiful’? I love it! ”

Hailey gave him a hard look. Was he serious?

He looked so sincere… but glancing over at him as they walked side by side toward a huge, swanky bank of elevators, she noticed he had already looked away from her and was scanning the lobby of the building to see if there was anyone there he needed to glad-hand before they got on. Meaningless compliments apparently just rolled off his tongue.

Okay. She sized him up pretty quickly. He was just one of those TV types she’d always heard about, shallow, frenetic, would say or do anything to get a story. Note to self… Take Russo with a pinch, no… a box… of salt.

The elevator was so spacious it felt like a room, oak paneled with high-def flat-screen color TVs installed flush on either side of the doors. Pretty luxe. Both screens were tuned to GNE and were flashing shots of dead civilians on a roadside in Afghanistan. The screen quickly dissolved into four old white men in suits, in boxes like The Brady Bunch intro, politicians arguing about White House strategy.

The elevator shot smoothly up to the thirtieth floor, where they stepped off and turned right. Russo swiped another security pad built into the wall next to huge swinging glass doors. Pleasant music piped into the area just outside the elevator banks ended abruptly and Hailey could hear raised voices in the distance. Even a long corridor away from the show’s headquarters, tension was palpable. It hung in the air.

Walking along with Russo, she turned right into his office. The windows looked down onto a tiny park with cement instead of grass and some sort of statue in the center. It was surrounded by high-rises whose windows were grimy, many of them looking back vacantly, their blinds askew, suggesting they desperately needed tenants.

“Nice office, huh? I love it! ”

He certainly loved a lot.

“Took me ten years, but I got the window!” I guess beauty’s in the eye of the beholder… Hailey managed to keep that thought to herself. He seemed so proud of his window office, she felt guilty for noticing the bleak view.

“You’ll just have to excuse me, Hailey. I don’t feel so good today. I ate at the diner across the street, and I’m pretty sure there was a hair in my eggs. I’ve felt nauseous ever since. Has that ever happened to you? You know… a hair in your eggs?”

“No… I don’t recall a hair in my eggs…” She could add nothing to Tony’s personal horror story.

He went on. “Yep… I finally got the window office. Everybody wanted it, but they gave it to me .” While Russo’s face and body were angled toward her from behind a corporate-looking desk, the same as every other desk in the building, his eyes remained glued to his computer, its lighted screen glowing dimly back onto his face.