Эд Горман: Murder Straight Up

“Damn,” I said.

I couldn’t even see him. Just hear him.

Then I couldn’t even hear him anymore.

He was gone, lost in the clouds below. I stood listening to traffic, an airplane forging ahead through the muck overhead, a distant siren. “Damn,” I said again. But this time I knew exactly whose ass I was gnawing on. My own.

I was going to look like one swell security guard when I filed my report with the Federated people. Not to mention the people at Channel 3.

On the first floor, in the light, I found the muddy footprints and learned how he’d gotten inside.

A john near the newsroom had gotten clogged up and started to overflow. One of the maintenance engineers had called a plumber, who, in turn, had come over and fixed the john. The only trouble was that he had left the back door — through which he’d brought all his tools — open by laying a wrench between door and jamb. You didn’t exactly need to be a brain surgeon to figure out how to sneak in.

I made all the proper reports, first to the police, second to Federated and third to a man named Sears, who was essentially my boss here at Channel 3. His official title was Building Manager. He clucked and said, “Damn, the boss ain’t gonna like it. Damn.” Then he hung up. The boss he referred to was a Mr. Robert Fitzgerald, station owner and local celebrity. He did his own editorials. You found him either stirring or hilarious. He could have given John Philip Sousa a few lessons in corn.

Around nine-fifty I went into the coffee room the newspeople use and had a snack from the vending machines, a purposely unhealthy one. Ho-Hos. Pepsi with real sugar. Even if it was the plumber’s fault the kid had gotten in, I didn’t look real good. Not with a busted flashlight and a kid who had found an easy way in and an even easier way out.

I let the news distract me.

The network show was just finishing, music up and the announcer talking about what the lucky viewer would find on the early-morning show; then suddenly there was David Curtis, Channel 3 anchorman, looking solemn as he told us what was ahead in just a few moments.

You had your basic city council scandal (the mayor was a flunky, it seemed, for every major vested interest this side of the Mississippi); you had your basic governor-at-the-ribbon-cutting-ceremony-for-a-new-factory story; you had your basic bad-news number on the Cubs (they always looked so happy; you’d think they’d have the decency to look glum at least once in awhile, the Cubbies); and you had your basic hotdog weatherman who tonight (no shit) was promising to sing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” in honor of his grandmother’s birthday.

While the commercials were on, I looked around the coffee room. There were enough plastic chairs and tables in here to make Ronald McDonald happy for a long time. On the right was an imposing row of vending machines that sold everything from stale sandwiches to fake hot chocolate. On the left was a long bulletin board that attested to the celebrity of local newspeople. Here was Dave Curtis in his Channel 3 T-shirt making nice-nice with a heartbreakingly sad-looking little girl in leg braces; here was the singing weatherman, Bill Hanratty, leading a chorus of elderly citizens, each of whom wore a Channel 3 T-shirt; here was the ex-pro football player and now sports announcer Mike Perry in coaching togs (cap, whistle, Channel 3 T-shirt) explaining a play to a group of teenage black kids; and here was co-anchor Dev Robards, white-haired, white-bearded and Hemingwayesque, hunched over a typewriter in a pose that looked like a movie still from a 1930s tough-guy film.

There was something about the self-congratulatory air of these photographs that made me smile. From the little I’d gotten to know the Channel 3 news team (I’d been working here a week of nights), I had come glumly to realize that that was how they perceived themselves, in some theatrical way as idealized “stars.” Hey, man, Jerry Lewis helps the fuckin’ crippled kids; so can we, you know?

The door opened, and in came a slender, dark-haired woman in tight designer jeans and a blue pullover sweater. With the bow in her hair she managed to look younger than the body pushing against the jeans suggested. Her name was Kelly Ford. She was Channel 3’s news consultant.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice suggested that she thought it was wonderful of herself to speak in such a nice way to the hired help. She was in her mid-forties and — despite herself and her bullshit arrogance — there was something sexy in the desperation of her dark glance and the twitchy way she pushed quarters into the Pepsi machine. You began to think the arrogance wasn’t real, that it was a bluff.

“We’ve painted the set a new color for tonight. See what you think.”

“Sure,” I said.

I looked down at the empty Ho-Hos package in front of me. I noticed that she was noticing it, too. I’m afraid there is not much good you can say about a man my age who eats Ho-Hos.

“Glad to see somebody else has the same problem.”

“Oh, yeah,” I kind of muttered. “Junk food.”

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you.” She stood over me, hip cocked, smiling. “But I did, didn’t I?”

“Sort of, I guess. I mean personally I feel that anybody who would eat Ho-Hos is capable of doing anything.”

She laughed. “Anything?”

I nodded. “Unfortunately, yes.”

Then something happened to her face. The smile vanished as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. Her eyes narrowed. Her jaw locked. “Straight up,” she said, glancing at the clock that read exactly ten o’clock. “The show is starting.” Her transformation from chatty companion to all-business news consultant was almost terrifying in its abruptness. But then, in a real sense, this was “her” show. Or at least it was her very nice fortyish ass that was on the line.

You know how news shows open these days. All that hokey horseshit with the fast cuts and up-tempo music to show that our newspeople go out there and, by God, personally bring the news back themselves. Right.

Well, it was just after one of those standard-issue news openings when it happened. The sequence was this. First there was a shot that briefly showed the entire Channel 3 team: David Curtis and Dev Robards, co-anchors; singing Bill Hanratty, weatherman; and Mike Perry, sports. And then the director cut to the number-two camera.

That’s when David Curtis, just as the camera fixed on him, got a very odd look on his otherwise handsome face and brought a hand up abruptly to his throat. A small silver circle of foam formed around his lips. His eyes bugged as he rose out of his seat. In a restaurant once I’d seen a man start to choke. Curtis looked this way now, desperate for somebody to help him.

He put the other hand to his throat — again the impression he was strangling — but before he could do anything else, he fell face first across his desk. On the screen you saw the hump of his shoulder blade and a blank Chroma wall in front of which he’d been sitting.

“Oh, my God,” Kelly Ford said. “Oh, my God.” The horror on her face could be likened only to films of the Robert Kennedy assassination that still haunt me. A kind of*silent scream on the faces of the onlookers, the mouth pulling back, the jaw dropping down, the neck snapping...

“I’ve got to go in there,” she said. “My God.”

She tried to set her drink on the table, but she missed. Ice and Pepsi exploded on the floor. Not that either of us gave a damn. At the moment we had more serious things to worry about.

Edelman had been picking at something in his nose for the past twenty minutes. I was offering up a silent prayer that he would get the little bugger. I mean, here he was in charge of a very prominent homicide investigation and, in full view of many members of the press, he was walking around doing that... He also wore a big squeaky pair of crepe-soled shoes. Not unlike mine. Edelman is on his feet a lot, too.