Ed Gorman: Serpent's kiss

In the centre of it was writing in ballpoint pen.

He had to hold the paper close to his face to read it.

MARIE FANE

He knew instantly who she was, and why her name was here.

Despite himself, he raised one of the photos and studied it again.

Marie Fane was alive now, but soon enough she would be one of these dead and savaged women.

And he did not have to wonder about who her killer would be.

A sullen black youth in leg irons and handcuffs being led to a police car raised his left hand and flipped everybody the bird.

Cut to: Three SWAT team cops kneeling down behind a car as a beefy white man swaggered across a night-time parking lot firing two handguns at them.

Cut to: a pretty teenage girl sobbing about her addiction to crack cocaine.

Cut to: a mayor's aide running to his car obviously trying to outdistance the reporter who kept yelling questions at him about an alleged contractor payoff and cover up.

The one thing all these pieces of videotape had in common was the presence, at the end of each story, of a tall, redheaded woman in her mid-thirties. While nobody had ever called her beautiful she did have a vivacious intelligence that made her unabashedly sexy both on camera and off. Her full mouth was by turns wry and sombre, her green eyes by turns comic and vulnerable, and her voice by turns ironic and sad. She signed off each piece the same way: "This is Chris Holland, Channel 3 News."

Now, a Chris Holland four years older sat in a small editing room in the back of the noisy Channel 3 newsroom smoking one of her allotted three cigarettes a day, and editing a videotape.

What she was putting together was called an audition reel. Reporters take their best stories, edit them together, and send them out to potential employers, i.e., TV stations around the country. Maybe the reporter is a city type who suddenly longs for a few years in the boonies; maybe the reporter is trying to survive a bad divorce and feels a change of scenery will stave off putting the old head in the oven; or-and this is the most likely scenario-the reporter feels it's now time for him/her to take that shot at working in a bigger and better market-trade in Des Moines, say, for Chicago or Terre Haute for LA. Or, if you've just been fired, trade in your present situation for just about any place where the currency is American and the plumbing is indoors. At any given time in the USA it is estimated that more than five thousand newspeople are sneakily putting together audition tapes and another five thousand are at various post offices shipping their mothers off somewhere. While this is no doubt an exaggeration, it isn't an exaggeration by much.

Just now, watching her audition reel whip by, Chris Holland made a judgement. In her earlier days, she had definitely come on as a bimbette. Oh, nothing crass and obvious like blowing kisses at the camera or hanging an AVAILABLE FOR OCCUPY sign on her back. But little things, teeny tiny things, a fluttering eyelash here, a kind of sexy inflection there, had definitely been a part of her news presentation. And while she was not one of those feminists who wore cast iron chastity belts and threw darts at posters of Burt Reynolds, she did have enough self-respect to see what she'd been doing. Just too cute and too coy by half.

She rewound the tape, took the reel off the editing machine, put it back in its box, shut off the machine, shut out the light, and left the editing room for up front where, at this time of morning, the Channel 3 reporters gathered to get their assignments from Heinrich Himmler's illegitimate son, a fat Irishman named O'Sullivan.

O'Sullivan had been here six years, had survived three changes of management, two changes of consultant groups, an ex-wife who still believed that adultery was okay if you didn't get caught, a teenage daughter who was dating a biker she insisted on calling 'sensitive,' and a group of nine reporters who felt he was exercising a personal vendetta against each one of them.

Chris knew all these things because two nights a week she went bowling with O'Sullivan. Most of her co-workers saw this as nothing more than her sucking up to her boss, but in fact, she liked O'Sullivan and considered him one of the few men she could talk to. Behind the ketchup stained neckties, the dandruff flaked shoulders, the beard stubbled chin, and the extra thirty pounds was a man who knew about Baudelaire as well as boxing, about Degas as well as de Gaulle, and about Edward R. Murrow as well as MTV Early on-this was just after his wife had walked out on him and Chris's own main squeeze had started being unfaithful, too-they'd tried having an affair, but it had led to little more than some heavy eighth-grade-style petting, some dawn-sober admissions of loneliness and fear on both parts, and the awesome realisation that somehow, against all odds, a woman and a man had become very good platonic friends. Buddies, even pals, but not lovers. So they went bowling and got beer-drunk and O'Sullivan did the best he could to treat her just like all the other reporters on his news team- shitty.

As she approached O'Sullivan's office, she heard a male voice pontificating: "I'm saying we need Joe Six-Pack. Don't get me wrong, but the psychographics of bowling are very different from the psychographics of tennis, and our advertising base damn well knows it."

This could only be Ron Pendrake, the news consultant. To confirm this, she peeked around the door and there he was inside O'Sullivan's office, Ron Pendrake himself wielding a blue Magic Marker and drawing key words on O'Sullivan's stand-up easel. Every few seconds, Pendrake would throw back a page and start a new one, always being as dramatic as possible.

Now that he was aware of her in the doorway, Pendrake did what he always did, settled his beady green eyes on her breasts, which might have been flattering under some circumstances, but Pendrake always zeroed in on your breasts to the exclusion of everything else. He still wanted his mama.

This morning, however, there was something wrong with Pendrake because right after he wrenched his eyes from her chest, he looked miserably over at O'Sullivan. And then promptly quit talking. Ron Pendrake, news consultant, never quit talking.

It was as if she'd walked in on a private conversation that had been about her.

And so she knew, of course, that something terrible had gone on here, or was about to go on, and somehow it all had something to do with her.

"Well, if it isn't the best looking woman in TV news!" Ron Pendrake said as she came into the office. That was something else he never did. Flatter you.

Oh, my God, what was happening here this morning?

Then she saw O'Sullivan's face and he took away all her doubts. He kept his head down and wouldn't look at her.

Oh, yes; oh, yes: something awful was about to happen.

"Well," said Ron Pendrake, diving for his suit jacket and his briefcase, "I just remembered that I've got to go up and see Fenton."

He was a little guy, Pendrake, always dashing and bouncing and diving, and for some reason she'd always wanted to call him Sparky. In fact, all news consultants should be called Sparky. There was something callow and adolescent about them, as if they'd always remain the smartest kids in high school, but would never grow up beyond that.

"Well," Ron Pendrake said, managing to include both of them in the same glance. "You two have a nice day."

And so, even though his cologne was decidedly still with them, Ron Pendrake himself was not. Now, he was just quickly retreating footsteps down the hall.

She said, "So what's going on?"

"Nothing. Why?"

"I just get the feeling that something's happening."

"Why would you say that?"

He had yet to look up. He was pretending to be mightily busy looking for something in one of his desk drawers.