Savant (10 page)
"You got a Band-Aid hanging from your face," the news reader told him as he eased out the door, "by the way."
"Thanks," he said, noticing his goofy reflection and peeling the small strip off and wadding it up in his fingers. He was glad that when he'd smacked his head in that gesture he hadn't given himself a headache again.
Jesus.
Trask walked down the hall past Production Studio B and Engineering, the Talent Lounge where the lesser air people hung out or had small cubicles, past Kidder's and Flynn's suites, and into the guts of "Inside America." Three offices, of which the largest was the producer's, were located across from the Programming Department's bathroom. Visitors to the P.D.'s office, the controller, bookkeeping people, copy chief and copywriter, purchasing assistant, and news readers all shared this one bathroom. The door was directly across from Trask's office. He was wedged in between the "Jew and Jewess," as Sean Flynn called them. (Flynn called the triumvirate "two Jews and a snooze.") Babaloo Metzger, whom he didn't trust, and Barb Rose, nee Barbra Rozitsky, his sworn enemy, were on either side of him, and all day long people went to the crapper across from his office.
He had one hour before the production meeting. They were set for tonight and tomorrow night. They need a guest, a topic, a theme. Flynn was antsy.
He looked at his bulletin board, skimmed through his files, eyeballed notes. Somewhere, there was a clipping in this stack of garbage—yes! There! The words "Black Dahlia" leaped out at him. A highly publicized 1947 murder case. He had a slant. He'd interviewed a guy with LAPD Homicide and had some notes which he began to shape for the production meeting. A team of volunteers had been called to the sight of this ancient torture/mutilation/slaying, because a woman had said she had memories of her father "killing women." They were going to dig. They didn't find anything. But Trask thought he could get some good stuff out of the person with whom the woman's therapy sessions had been conducted.
Four P.M.: Metzger knocked at his door, rubbing the indentations made by his glasses.
"Let's go."
"Okay." Trask got up and gathered his notes. They waited for Barb Rose to join them. She was an attractive, dark-haired woman with good features, a wide mouth, and carefully coiffed hair. She could have been any age from twenty to forty—one of those faces. She dressed upscale, and the largest pair of earrings Trask had ever seen on a white woman dangled from her ears.
"Hi," she said to both men. "You look like you cut yourself."
"Uh-huh," Trask said.
"Umm." Her tone said it all. Too bad it wasn't lower and more severe. Why did they compete so fiercely? "Had any coffee yet?"
"No. Been too busy." God! He wondered if she was actually going to be nice and get him a cup of coffee.
"You look like you need a cup," she said, ever the comic. They made their way into the Programming Conference Room, a somber place about the size of a railroad car, with a dozen or so chairs scattered around two scarred wooden tables placed end to end. Downstairs, the Sales Conference Room looked like the meeting space of a major bank. Upstairs, the conference room resembled the kind of place the border police bring people suspected of drug smuggling.
The three of them took seats as far apart from each other as possible, and waited for Flynn. He soon came, accompanied by the Mystery Tramp, which is what they called Jerri Laymon, who brought his coffee and various papers. She was a sultry, mysterious woman who was quite pretty but who wore dark glasses most of the time, and at night. Everybody thought Sean Flynn was putting the pork to her. Trask and Flynn thought Babaloo was porking Barb Rose. Nobody thought Trask was doing much of anything, except maybe with himself.
Flynn, handsome, gray and silver-headed, with a dark black mustache, his silk tie askew, read quietly, then—not looking up—said, "Who's got something for the hole?"
"I do," Barb Rose said, and everybody looked at her. "Remember the so-called Black Dahlia murder?"
For ten minutes Barb Rose did a presentation based on Trask's notes. There was no way she could have come up with all the material independently, since some of the stuff had been gleaned from a phoner Trask did with the West Coast homicide dick. She had to have had a bug in his office or a tap on his phone. Or somebody else did and she had access to the tape.
"I don't think it's strong enough, even with the tie-in to the local case and the therapist. I do like the therapist interview, and that's strong material on the business about regressing a patient. Let's go at it from a 'Scam or Science' angle, you know?" Flynn pitched his voice down a register. "Psychiatry and hypnosis, how much of it is real, how much is pure hogwash? Something along those lines. Get that old Bridey Murphy thing and get me the background on how it was brought forth, later proven a hoax and so on." He looked at Trask, who was itching to say something.
"What? You got something?" Sean Flynn asked.
"Yeah. What you just heard." He slid all his notes across the table and glanced at Barb Rose, whose face was a mask. She had a pair, he'd give her that.
"Nu?" Flynn glanced at a couple of the pages.
"So doesn't this strike you as a tad odd? We've got the identical shit?"
"Okay," Flynn said with a smile. "So?"
Trask just stared at him and shrugged.
"What's wrong?" Barb asked innocently. "Did he come up with similar stuff?"
"Yeah," Flynn said. "Coincidences happen. What can I say. Let's get on with it. Here's the way I think the show should come together: first, you guys get me somebody who…" Victor Trask tuned halfway out as the meeting continued and Flynn put the "Discoveries Made in Therapy" program together.
They eventually went back to their cubicles and Trask made a cursory search of his phone and office. Nothing looked out of place, but how would he know if he saw something? He gathered up a briefcase full of papers and looked at his watch: six-fifteen P.M. Buzz, his old engineer buddy, was still working dayparts last he'd heard. He'd check at the "Zoo" first.
Trask left the KCM building and found a pay phone. It was still bright daylight at six-twenty. He dropped money, dialed, and after a half-dozen rings, a young girlish voice answered.
"Z-60."
"Hi. Is Buzz Reid working, do you know?"
"Is who working?"
"Buzz Reid? Engineering?"
"Um. One moment please." The line went dead. He waited. It was hot and smelly in the alcove where he was calling. There were two coin phones side by side, with a small divider for privacy between them. Old tobacco smoke and God-knows-what-all made him wrinkle his nose. There were no directories, which had gone the way of phone booths years ago. Vandalism had seen to their demise. Most of the public phones near KCM were card-type or third-party-billing-number-type. Again, coin ops had been phased out because of vandals. He flipped his pen out and scrawled the word
vandalism
on a pad. This was the kind of stuff he fed off of. He might be able to get a show out of that one thought. Now he'd start a file on the topic and see just where it led him. He was writing
locked churches
when a voice said hello.
"Buzz?"
"Yo."
"Vic."
"Hey, man. What's up?"
"Not too much. I wondered if I could buy you a cold one when you get off? Talk about a couple things."
"I can't do it tonight. I got a game."
"When?"
"I'm going to be leaving in about…fifteen or twenty minutes, matter of fact."
"Would you have time to grab a cup cross the street? Five minutes or whatever? It's kind of important."
"Yeah, if you wanna come on by right now. I could give you ten minutes or something. Say—meet me at Sammy's in five minutes?"
"I'll be there. Thanks." Trask hung up, started to walk, and changed his mind. Went around the comer and saw a couple of taxis in front of a nearby hotel, got in the first one and had them take him the eight blocks to the greasy spoon across from the radio station. He got there before Buzz Reid did. He had his coffee in front of him when the engineer walked in.
"Hey, stranger," Reid said, settling down beside him in time to have a cup of coffee set in front of him. "Thanks."
"I appreciate it," Trask said. "I know you're runnin' but I wanted to shoot the shit a minute."
"No problem." Buzz was notorious in Kansas City radio. He was forever trying to get guys to screw his wife, a plain woman in her thirties, who, Trask recalled, had long red hair and an Olive Oyl shape. Reid and his wife were "into swinging," so he claimed. Trask had always managed to slip out of such invitations. It was all but impossible to fire an engineer, but his sexual "misconduct" had somehow gotten him terminated from KCM, in spite of a ferocious shop steward and an unforgiving union, back in the days before they'd worked together at the Zoo. He
hated
KCM, and had a great deal of expertise in what Trask thought of as "bugging."
"You remember how you always used to say they taped the phone calls and stuff at KCM?" he whispered to the small, thin man at the counter beside him.
"Um."
"Is that something you knew for a fact or were you saying what you thought they were doing?"
"Fact. They tape everything. Not just the phones."
"How did you know? Mind if I ask—confidentially?"
"I heard the fuckin' tapes is how. Jimmy Olfanski who used to be the chief at KCM showed me all that shit downstairs. I heard private conversations made in the sales manager's office, in the fuckin' control room. Et cetera, et cetera."
"Downstairs."
"In the manager's office it used to be. Now it's all in the security room down there next to the supplies 'n' shit. Everybody knows about it. They been doin' that shit for years."
"And they play all that back and listen to it? Everybody's conversations? Why?"
"Who the fuck knows, man. They like to keep an upper hand. You know how management is, pops. Always fuckin' with everybody's head. They sit down there and watch the tapes, I guess, and make random checks and that. Old Inspector Higgins his bad self. I guess that's what he does all day. Sits there watching the tapes and jerkin' his wire."
"Watching—you mean they got videotapes?"
"You see the cameras, man. What did you think?"
"I knew they could see, but I never imagined they would be taping with video. What the hell's the point of it all? What do they expect to see or hear?"
"Hey. Go figure. I suppose…employee theft or some shit. I really don't know. I know I could sabotage the shit out of their security systems and they'd never fuckin' know what hit them."
"Yeah? How would you do that?" Trask asked.
"I know some shit about that place, man." Buzz Reid leaned close and whispered conspiratorially, "I know how to get into Security…" Trask just looked at him. "…from above, baby."
"How?"
"Engineering."
"Yeah?"
"You know where the equipment room is across from those offices like Copy and Purchasing?" Trask nodded. "In the early days that's where the other stairwell was. You could drop a ladder down through the back of the equipment closets and climb right down to the ceiling of the security room, pull the partitions out—" Reid proceeded to detail a break-in somewhere between Topkapi and the Brink's job.
"Judas! I wouldn't have the
cojones
for that, brother."
"Well, anyway—it could be done easily. Tear all that Big Brother bullshit up, man."
"Is there a way to stop that sort of surveillance? You know—make it so they can't hear what you're saying over the phone or in a private conversation in an office?"
"Sure. In theory, they got every kind of bug jammer you can want—stop any sort of pickup from phone taps to reflection bugs. Cost you a few hundred bucks to get a real good one, but they're available."
"Um."
"I got to get my ass in gear, man. Anything else?" Reid took a last sip of coffee.
"No. But I may call for more advice."
"Anytime. Whyn't you come out to the house sometime? Party with us."
"Might just do that one of these days. Hey, Buzz, I really do appreciate your time. I'll holler at you again, maybe."
"Sure thing. Good to see you." Reid got up and waved a salute.
"Same here."
Trask took a mouthful of cool coffee and held it for a few seconds, not wanting to swallow.
B
ack at KCM that evening he found a "progress memorandum," as Flynn liked to call them, from The Man himself, telling Trask—in effect—you're letting down, looking for excuses; get your shit together. Not in so many words, but that was the sum of the long memo. He'd have been willing to bet good money that Barb Rose hadn't been sent one. He knew Flynn always checked with Metzger when he was sending memos or whatever, so this was probably a joint venture. He could recall phrases Babaloo had used in various shitty conversations they'd had: "open up the topics" and "start looking for larger themes" were two that echoed.
Specifics? Make-work. Time-consuming legman/legwoman stuff that he found interfered with the more serious business of digging. Stuff Barb should be doing, he felt. And then there was a page on what Flynn called "Factlets," the little stuff that he would use to weave into the nightly commentary that made people think he was a genius. In the middle of a discussion of The Impatient American, and how we wanted instant rewards and instant gratification, Flynn told a shrink guest, "Did you know, on average, we spend three years of our life waiting for traffic lights?" The shrink laughed, called him on it, and he produced the clinical verification off the "top of his head." Trask's work. You couldn't give him too many Factlets, he had a consuming obsession for the damned things, and they were a pain in the butt to find. Once one had exhausted the obvious printed recorded sources they were hard-won nuggets.
The memo was the perfect ending to a really semi-shit day that had become the genuine article. He went home in a blue funk, his head full of microphone paranoia and Factlet phobia.