Do You Want to Know a Secret? (10 page)

Eliza went into Janie’s 101 Dalmations–decorated bedroom and kissed the head with hair the exact shade as her own. It was amazing how much Janie looked like John as she slept. Like everything else Janie did in her life, the little girl even slept purposefully, getting her rest for another busy day of nursery school, lunch, Riverside Park and the merry crew of preschoolers who played there in the afternoons. With a little luck, by the time Janie and Mrs. Twomey got back from the park, Eliza would be home.

The driver had the car radio on. Shock-jock Howard Stern was in full throttle. “What the hell’s going on over at that place?
KEY News
is falling apart. First Kendall bites the dust. Now, you’re telling me, Robin, that Eliza Blake is loony?”

Robin Quivers, Stern’s on-air sidekick, laughed. “No, Howard. It doesn’t say
loony
. It says that she spent some time in a hospital that treats substance abusers and people with mental problems.”

“So what is she anyway? A junkie?”

The driver snapped off the radio.

When she arrived at the
KEY to America
offices, the day’s newspapers were already piled on her desk. The headlines all trumpeted the anchorman’s death.

Harry Granger handed her a cup of coffee.

“Unreal, huh?” he shuddered.

Teaming Harry Granger with Eliza Blake had been the network’s attempt to break the morning co-host mold followed by the other networks. KEY took a chance that viewers would want an alternative to the thirty- and early forty-something teams on the other shows.

Granger was in his late fifties and on first impression would be described as craggy. He had a way of saying what others were thinking but hesitated to say aloud. This tendency had, on more than one occasion, gotten him into controversial situations. On any given morning viewers, as well as the show’s producers, were never quite sure what Harry would ask or respond in an interview. It lent an excitement to the show.

There had also developed an interesting tension between the two on air. They genuinely liked each other. Granger sometimes came across as paternalistic toward Eliza. Sometimes she went with it and enjoyed it, other times she bristled at it. Always there had been a mutual admiration and stimulation and it came across to the audience. The ratings reflected that the viewers liked what they saw.

“God, I just saw him Tuesday,” Harry continued. “In fact, we had coffee in the commissary together. We talked about the usual. . . company politics, the ratings, the campaign. . . .” Granger paused for a moment, his eyes focused on the pen he was twisting in his hands. “It’s such a short damned ride. I can’t believe he just dropped dead.”

“Neither can I,” Eliza sighed. She lifted her mug and carefully sipped the bitter black brew. “Bill was always so kind to me. I remember when John died. . . .” Eliza’s voice trailed off. She bit the inside corner of her mouth. She didn’t want to start crying now. She looked down at the papers on her desk.

Granger patted her hand. He knew her well enough to know that she would talk when she was ready. “Go ahead, read on,” he said. As he walked slowly away, Eliza heard him grumbling to himself, “There’s no way in hell that Pete Carlson can fill Bill’s shoes.”

Eliza was unaware that Harry’s eyes followed her as she turned to her Newstar terminal and typed in K-E-N-D-A-L-L. He watched her fiddling with the little charm on the bracelet she always wore as a long list of stories slugged for the anchorman popped on the computer. Poor kid. She’d been through a lot. John was a nice guy and she had been crazy about him. She had taken it hard. Now, to have the hospitalization brought up in such a scabby way, casting doubt on her ability to do a job she clearly excelled at, no, she didn’t need that. She didn’t deserve it.

Harry could not know that Eliza was turning her dream of last night over in her mind and the biting comments she’d just heard on the radio as she highlighted the latest entry and punched the button to make the editorial information appear on the screen.

Much of the data was a repeat of what she had learned from Mack McBride’s report on the special. The only new information was what Mack had not been able to pin down from the police last night. The autopsy on Bill Kendall’s body was being done today.

Chapter 15

The
KEY to
America
morning show televised from a ground floor glassed-in studio. During the live broadcast, outdoor television monitors allowed those who showed up each day a chance to see themselves on national TV.

The man noticed that the crowd gathered outside was larger than usual this morning.

He never went too near the crowd. The voices told him not to. Instead, he watched the monitors from a distance. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t hear what was being said because Eliza Blake spoke to him directly. Sometimes she told him where to go and sometimes she even told him where to find the animals for his beloved brass menagerie.

Something was wrong today.

Eliza looked very serious and sad on the monitors. She usually smiled a lot.

Now a news story was playing in the monitors. There was a closeup picture of a handsome man on the screen and then a reporter was standing in front of a townhouse with a big black door. A big elephant doorknocker gleamed from the center of the door. At the bottom of the screen flashed the reporter’s name and his location.

The homeless man recognized the townhouse. He had passed it many times on his rounds. He had always admired that knocker, but the voices had never told him to take it.

Until now.

Chapter 16

Louise Palladino Kendall
stepped into the marble foyer. In the few months she had been living there, she had grown to love her condominium at Bears Nest. Her generous divorce settlement from Bill Kendall allowed her to have a very comfortable lifestyle.

She had purchased the multilevel, luxury condo in Park Ridge, New Jersey, when William moved to the supervised group home where he lived with five other mentally retarded adults. Louise had no longer wanted the house with its accompanying worries. Everything from security to snow removal was now included in her monthly maintenance fee. It made her life much simpler.

Her neighbors were mostly executives employed by the corporations headquartered in the northern New Jersey area, successful private businessmen, lawyers and doctors. There had also been famous residents. Former President and Mrs. Nixon had made their home at Bears Nest. That certainly had not hurt real estate values.

Louise was more aware than most of the market prices of condominiums, and most of the other residential real estate in the Pascack Valley as well. Louise Kendall sold real estate. She was quite good at it.

When Bill had gotten the New York network job, they had decided to live in the suburbs. Better for William, they decided, to be somewhere where he could freely roam around the backyard than life in the city. Both William and they had enough to contend with. Making day-to-day living as pleasant and easy as possible had been a high priority for the Kendalls.

That was before they had finally gotten a diagnosis for William’s developmental delays, before they had ever heard of Fragile X syndrome.

At first, Louise had frantically occupied herself with getting William settled in his special school and immersed herself in the therapies, teaching theories, specialists and constant worrying that went along with having a child with “special needs.” It was the constant worrying that sent her way down.

Bill was new at KEY at the time and the network seemed to think they owned him. He was away quite often, many times for long stretches. Alone at the end of the day, when William was finally sleeping quietly, Louise had too much time to think.

She thought about her son and his future. She thought about the cruelty of other children and the ignorance of some adults. She cringed at the thought of William being made fun of by anyone. She thought about the looks from other mothers at the Grand Union, their eyes quickly averted when caught staring at her little boy as he flapped his arms and bit his hands in the supermarket aisle, or bit holes in the neck of his shirt while he bounced up and down on his toes at the checkout counter. She thought about what kind of life William could expect and what, in turn, that would mean to her life. And finally, she thought about what her son’s life would be after she was gone. These thoughts consumed her.

Finally, her doctor had told her that she had to get some sort of work out of the house. Real estate had fit the bill. She could make her own schedule, was always in the area, easily accessible to either home or school if William needed her. The fact that she enjoyed her work was an unanticipated bonus.

The work served her well and she was grateful for it. When her marriage ended, she was thankful that she had her real estate career on which to force her concentration. It was work that provided her with a social outlet as well as a sense of purpose.

But tonight, as she walked across the freshly vacuumed carpet and switched on the light, real estate and its values were far from her mind.

Bill dead.

William’s father, her ex-husband, the man she had lived with for fourteen years. No warning. Gone.

The last twenty-four hours could not have really happened. The frantic call from Millie, the maddening ride into New York, crazed at the thought of William being there, needing her. The frustrating traffic, even going toward the city at evening rush hour, crawling across the George Washington Bridge. She had listened as the radio announcer talked about the death of the KEY anchorman. Bill, her Bill.

William had run to her, eyes swollen. Limited though his mental capacities may have been, William understood that his father, the man he loved more than any other, had died. He sobbed like the child that he was.

The police had been polite but there really wasn’t much they could tell her beyond what she had already heard on the car radio. The autopsy would tell more.

Louise had appeared calm. Icy, a policeman would later describe her to his celebrity-struck wife. Louise remained in the townhouse until the body had been taken away and the police had completed what they had to do. She instructed the badly shaken Millie to go home, pressed some crisp bills into the housekeeper’s palm and told her that she would call her about what to do next. Louise and William left through the rear to avoid the television cameras out front. Ironic, she thought. Bill made his living in front of those cameras, and in his death we were trying to escape them.