Эд Горман - Murder Straight Up

“I’m sure that’s why Cronkite got out when he did,” Robards said. “Those dandies in the news consultancy business have even turned the networks into happy news. Look at Rather. The way they’ve got him sitting up so straight and all those eye smiles into the camera. It’s ludicrous.”

I smiled. I liked the bastard. “You don’t sound like the number-one suspect to me.”

“Why’s that?”

“You don’t sound like you want to stay in this business much longer.”

He sipped some more ginger ale. “Ah, but you can’t discount ego.” He looked out the wide window at the sun-tipped water. “My wife died ten years ago. It was one of those stupid, impossible things. She went to the grocery store and was broadsided in an intersection. Since then I’ve gotten very old.” He put his weary blue gaze on me. His cheeks were still sweaty. The fingers on his right hand still twitched. “Now all I have left is my ego. And I have to admit, as I’m sure others will tell you, that it hasn’t been easy for me, watching Curtis take over my previous position. I used to be number one in this town. I suppose it would have been easier to accept if I’d had any kind of personal life, but— Well, anyway, Curtis was just the kind of pretty boy Linda Swanson wanted.” I didn’t doubt the bitterness in his voice. “At least, that’s what she said her research proved.”

“You doubt her research?”

“Over the years, I’ve become friends with several consultants. Once in a while they’ve told me horror stories about their field — how research gets doctored to prove a certain point; how people in the field are too lazy to get the forms filled out properly so they just fill them out themselves; the way they always blame the stations for their own failures. The consultancy business is a real racket — very low overhead, extremely high profits and practically no accountability, not when you can keep fixing the blame on the very people who hired you.”

“The research is really altered?”

“Oh, not necessarily in the way you might think, but subtly. Consultants tend to know the answers they want in advance, so they do everything they can to subtly influence the outcome. It’s like the news itself — it’s as if Spiro Agnew came back from his grave and became the news czar. Remember how he used to bitch about there not being enough ‘good news’ on the air? Well, the consultants saw a way of getting themselves hired if they followed that formula, and that’s what they did. They convinced station owners that newspeople weren’t the best judges of news stories — hell, what did journalists know, all they were interested in was the facts — while these people with their so-called research knew how to give the public what it really wanted... happy news. The news consultants invented a job for themselves and took it.”

“Free enterprise.”

“Bullshit is more like it.”

A woman’s voice. “God, why do I feel I’m taking my life in my hands by stepping up here?”

I recognized her voice instantly, and even before I turned around, I felt an unmistakable little thrill.

“Hello,” she said.

Kelly Ford was dressed in a blue jersey jumper that gave her middle-aged body the look of a much younger woman. Dev Robards grinned. “I was just boring him to death with my stories of what shits news consultants are.”

“With the exception of me,” she said brightly.

“With the exception of you, of course.”

She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, and it was plain that there was an easy affection between the two. Only for a moment did something serious pass across her dark eyes. She looked carefully at the glass he held in his hand.

“It’s ginger ale, don’t worry.” He smiled.

“You’re doing very well, Dev. You should be proud.”

“You know, I damn well am proud,” he said, “now that you mention it.”

“Why don’t you join us for lunch?” Kelly asked, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to say yes, he would join us.

He looked at his ginger ale, killed it and said, “Actually, I have to go out to a grade school this afternoon and talk about news.”

“Nobody knows more on the subject than you,” Kelly said.

He grinned devilishly. There was something boyish about it. “I have research that proves otherwise.”

“He’s incorrigible.” She laughed.

He put down his glass, straightened his golf cap, kissed Kelly on the cheek and then walked away, looking even more now like the lord of a manor outside Dublin.

“The public doesn’t want hard news,” Kelly Ford told me fifteen minutes later, after Robards had left, after a college boy dressed up like Captain Kidd served us our lunch, after what seemed like half the men in the place waved over to Kelly with appreciative, horny smiles. I had asked her about Dev Robards’s accusations. “Dev is a wonderful newsman,” she said. “But times have changed. People don’t have the appetite for hard news they once had. They seem to demand controversy instead of a simple presentation of the facts. It’s a different era from the one Dev grew up in. Today viewers like to be amused and titillated.”

“I suppose. But that doesn’t mean that I want to spend my time looking at stories about model-train collections and barbershop quartets, either.”

“Teenage prostitution,” she said.

“What?”

“Teenage prostitution.”

“What does that mean?”

“If I’d been videotaping your face, I could show you how interested you suddenly got in our conversation. And that’s how viewers respond. Very interested.”

“So that’s how the teenage suicide story came about?”

“Exactly.”

By now, of course, I’d figured out who she was. This morning while I’d been doing my pushups, I’d been watching a rerun of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and there she was, Kelly Ford. I’d been wondering what had happened to Mary now that she was in her forties. She’d said piss off to Lou and gone into the news consulting business, great looks and all.

“Well, some of the kids at Falworthy House think that David Curtis went too far.” I’d already told her about my visit with Karl Eler. About seeing Diane Beaufort and Mitch Tomlin at Channel 3 last night. Maybe Curtis’s death had been the result of Stephen Chandler’s suicide. “They seem to think that you people would do anything to make a story sensational.”

She touched a perfect finger to her perfect temple and in so doing made me realize that I was in bad need of being with a woman. Donna Harris and I had not exactly had a wonderful sex life since she’d been debating what to do about her ex-husband. I needed more than sex, of course, I always do, and in the dark shining gaze of Kelly Ford I suspected I’d find it. But there was the business at hand and I had to keep pushing.

“So you think that this Tomlin boy may have killed David?” she said. Whenever she mentioned the death, her eyes pinched just a bit.

“Maybe. But only one thing bothers me about that.”

“What?”

“The muddy tracks the kid made inside Channel Three last night.”

“I don’t understand.”

I signaled for another round.

“You were saying,” she said.

“The door the plumber left open, the door Mitch Tomlin snuck in, was a rear entrance with a flight of stairs to the second floor. The kid must have heard somebody coming as soon as he got inside and got up the steps. After Curtis died, I went back and checked out his tracks. He hid on the second floor, then started downstairs at some point. But that must have been when I went upstairs. So he had to run back up to the second floor and hide. His tracks on the first floor went only as far as the lobby. He didn’t get near Curtis’s dressing room. Not even close to it. It’s hardly conclusive proof, but it makes me wonder.”