Scoop (5 page)

“Mrs. Elva Jones?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m Ray Duffey from News Channel 7.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed with scrutiny. “From the tube?”

“Yes ma’am. From News Channel 7. May I talk to you about your pet pigs?”

“I watch Channel 10.”

“Yes ma’am, but I just wanted to talk to you about your pigs.”

“The police already done that.”

“We wondered if you had anything to say about the law regarding pet pigs on private property? Would you mind coming out to speak with us for a moment?”

She turned her attention to Beaker. Ray assumed he was smiling
pleasandy behind him, like he should be, and trying his best not to draw attention to the large camera on his shoulder. In tough interviews, Beaker would often carry the camera at waist level until the person was ready to be interviewed.

“Whaddya want me to say ’bout it?”

“Just your side of the story, ma’am. We want to report the whole story, and that includes what you have to say about it.”

She released the chain, pulled open the door, and pushed open the lopsided screen door. She didn’t seem to notice or care that she wasn’t exactly dressed for the camera. She was wearing a housecoat of some sort, and her hair was wound up tightly in curlers.

Ray hoped Beaker already had the camera rolling. Mrs. Jones looked around and then gave an angry nod toward her neighbors house. “Petey over there turned me in, and I know it. He’s been complaining about the smell for a year now.”

“The smell doesn’t bother you, ma’am?”

“They’re pigs. ’Course they’re going to smell.”

“So you understand why your neighbors complained?”

“No. I don’t complain about Petey’s mailbox leaning to the left, do I? Or the fact that he’s always screaming at his dog. I mind my own business, and Petey should mind his.”

“Do you agree with the law?”

“That you shouldn’t kill your neighbor?”

Ray bit his tongue and kept a straight face. “Uh, no ma’am, the law about owning farm animals on city property designated for homes.”

“What good is it to own your own home if you can’t do with it what you want? This land was passed down from my daddy to me. And we were here long before all these other houses came around. What we want to do with it is our business. We rightfully own it, and my daddy paid good money for it. This is America. If I want a pig in my yard, I should be able to have a pig in my yard!” She gathered her housecoat and said,
“Now I gotta get inside because
Wheel of Fortune
is ’bout to start.”

“Thank you for your time,” Ray said. He and Beaker turned and walked back toward the news truck. Beaker was suppressing one chuckle after another.

“I don’t complain about Petey’s mailbox leaning to the left, do I?’” Beaker let out a laugh. “It was all I could do to hold the camera steady.”

Ray opened the van door. “Don’t you find that the least bit sad?”

Beaker loaded his equipment into the van. “What?”

“That. Back there I mean, she does have a point.”

“A point? She’s got a literal pigsty in the middle of her backyard, Ray. The smell about knocked me over, and we were on her front porch.”

“She really believed in her right to own her property. There’s something to that. Maybe there’s no common sense in raising pigs in the middle of a neighborhood, but it’s the principle of it.”

“So you’d want to live next door to her? I’m sure Petey would sell you his house.” Beaker rolled his eyes as he wrapped the cords around one arm. “She’s an old woman who doesn’t have a clue about the real world, Ray.”

Ray sighed and Beaker crawled into the van’s compact editing bay.

Jim, the live truck operator, glanced back and said, “They want this live from in front of the house.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me,” Ray groaned. He checked his watch. He had thirty-five minutes to edit and memorize his notes.

I
n a quiet corner of the control room, with everyone abuzz, Hugo reviewed the anchors’ script for smirk pitfalls. Nobody quite understood how important this task was, but then again, nobody knew Tate Franklin like he did. Chad had believed that Hugo had scored big by landing this playboy-looking anchor at a busboy price. But the other price he was paying for the good looks and the charming smile was probably going to send Hugo to an early grave.

Tate looked the part and certainly practiced all the skills of a well-established anchor. Hugo had never seen anyone perform the eye-bounce as well as Tate. While many people didn’t see how this detail mattered for an anchor, Tate understood. He never cut his eyes sideways to his coan-chor or to another camera. He always looked down, then looked up and focused on whatever it was he was supposed to look at. Anything other than that makes an anchor look awkward, even shifty.

There was also a lot to be said for Tate’s intelligence. Not just a talking head, Tate seemed to understand what he was reporting. If he were given the chance, Hugo knew the young man could add some insight into certain topics. If only he didn’t have that smirk. That one, uncontrollable little smirk. Hugo wasn’t sure if he would hire Tate again, knowing what he knew now. Of course, desperate times called for desperate measures, so he supposed he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. But still, in all his years in the news business, he had never gone to such extremes to make a show work.

The smirk first appeared on Tate’s fourth broadcast. Gilda took a four-car accident story, because it was a more recent event and involved a lot of detail. When it came time for a plane-crash story, Tate read the
prompter like a pro. The script ended with, “And tonight, two families grieve the loss of two extraordinary men who were simply out for a nice day in the sky.”

And then he smirked. Hugo had not noticed it until that story.

Tate’s smirk was unbelievably detrimental to any kind of tragic news story. Hugo had spent hours with the kid, trying to help him realize that he smirked after his segments. But no matter how much they worked, the smirk always appeared. Tate tried his best to frown, to look serious, to capture the tragic moment in his expression, yet it was useless. The smirk always followed, and Hugo knew it made for a disastrous perception. Hugo would’ve even settled for feigned empathy. But nothing Tate tried could get past that uncontrollable expression on his face.

So Hugo decided there was only one thing
he
could do, and it worked out so well that he had celebrated by buying himself a new pair of shoes. Hugo wasn’t one for rewarding himself much.

Now they gave all the lighthearted stories to Tate and all the sad or tragic stories to Gilda. As far as Hugo knew, nobody had caught on to the formula, but it had worked out beautifully. Thanks to the deep vertical crease between Gilda’s eyebrows, she could carry any tragic story and look completely serious and saddened by it even if she wasn’t.

Of course, he’d told Gilda she was more experienced at those kinds of stories and that he needed her for that purpose. But in reality, it came down to an uncontrollable smirk and an unmentionable wrinkle.

It was pure magic. But it also kept Hugo on his toes, because he had to review every TelePrompTer script with unfailing accuracy, or things could come undone very quickly. It was especially tricky when breaking news was involved.

As if the smirk weren’t enough, Tate also had a laugh that sounded like a wheeze. It was the most awful thing Hugo had ever heard. Even a slight chuckle from Tate sounded like someone needed to run for an inhaler. So everyone knew, including the weatherman, Sam Leege, and
the sportscaster, Leon Black, that they were never to crack a joke if Tate was going to be on camera. Everyone had gotten used to this. Leon and Gilda always shared space before the sports segment, so that was the best time to get a few jokes in. And occasionally Sam, who was very witty, made jokes during his segment. At such times, Tate’s microphone was always turned down, so it just looked like he was smiling. Or smirking.

Tate had a few superstitions that Hugo chose to accommodate, but the most serious was Tate’s belief that he could not anchor a show on his own. He’d told Hugo this in his first interview, and Hugo had brushed it off as inexperience. But that one night when Gilda was out on assignment, Tate made a believer out of Hugo. In fact, it wasn’t a superstition. Tate simply couldn’t do the news alone. So Hugo lived with it, which really hadn’t been a problem, because Gilda wasn’t going anywhere. She’d once done the news while fighting off pneumonia, so there was a slim-to-none chance that Tate would ever have to go it alone.

Hugo glanced at one of the monitors, where Gilda was getting situated at the news desk. He checked his watch. She was out there a little early. He’d been trying to avoid her for most of the late afternoon because he wasn’t sure what the fallout was going to be from her talk with his assistant. Hayden had told him it went well. “Sometimes the truth is hard to take, but it’s always the best,” she’d said.

He’d taken that to mean that Gilda had finally seen the light concerning her dark spots and wrinkles. Really, his plan was absolutely perfect. He told Hayden to tell Gilda that some of the girls were going to a Botox party that coming weekend. Hugo knew that Gilda would feel less threatened if everyone was doing it. Now, of course, he was going to have to arrange a Botox party and spread the word about it to the other women at the station, but that was tomorrow’s problem. Tonight, he just needed to get through the newscast.

Roarke Keegan, the director of the assignment desk, rushed in with breaking news. “A tanker truck’s overturned, and traffic is backed up for
three miles on the interstate. Ed’s already up in the chopper and is going to cover it.”

“Thanks, Roarke. Keep me posted.” Hugo went to work on adding it to the script.

Ed Klawski was a godsend. He was a retired air force pilot who just wanted something to do with his day. So even though they couldn’t afford a real helicopter reporter, Ed did a fairly nice job of covering breaking news from the sky. But he had a bad tendency to shout out the report like he was back in Danang.

Hugo continued to flip through the agenda. Ray would cover an escalating dispute over pigs on private property, Jill was assigned to report on a controversial execution at the prison, and Trent was doing a report on the efficacy of the over-the-counter drug Beano. As the sound tech was attaching her microphone, Hugo noticed Gilda wasn’t her normal chatterbox self. Her face looked more drawn than usual, and she was staring off as if she were alone in a quiet room. He watched Tate ask her something, concern in his eyes, and she mumbled something back, nodded, and then looked away.

Hayden opened the door to the control room. Hugo beckoned her over.

“Hayden, you said that you thought it went well today with Gilda.”

“Yes.”

“So she didn’t seem upset?”

“I think she took it well.”

“I thought you said it went fine. Something about the truth is hard to take, you said, but she seemed okay.”

“We had a real heart to heart, which seems like something Gilda doesn’t get to do very often.”

Hugo shifted his weight, trying not to lose his patience. He checked his watch. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened?”

“Well, you told me to tell her about the Botox party that some of the girls were going to.”

“Yes? And?”

“We started talking about age and beauty and what real beauty is.”

Hugo swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“You know, just girl talk.” Hayden winked.

“I don’t girl talk much, so you’re going to have to fill me in.” He leaned toward her, feeling his eyes widen, which made her eyes widen.

She hesitated, took a little breath, and then said, “Well, Mr. Talley, I just felt that I needed to share the truth with Gilda.”

“Th-the truth? What truth? The truth about what?”

Hayden shrugged. “About what beauty really is. It comes from the inside, you know. We all age, and this world wants us to think that it’s all about what we look like on the outside, but what really matters is the heart.”

Hugo felt himself smiling. He didn’t know why. Possibly because, in theory, yes, the heart matters. But this wasn’t reality. This was the news business. What was she thinking

“Mr. Talley, are you okay?”

He tried to focus on her. “What?”

“Your hands are shaking.”

He looked down and balled them into fists behind his back. “I’m fine. I’m…I’m just…” He sighed. “So is she going to the Botox party or not?”

“Well, I don’t know. She asked if I received an invitation, and then she asked Jill, and of course none of us really had received anything official.”

Hugo’s face dampened with sweat in a half a second. “She…she was asking around?”

“I assured her not to worry, Mr. Talley, and that if the worst of her problems was that she got invited to exclusive parties that others didn’t, then she’s living the good life.”

Hugo slapped his forehead. This was one party that you didn’t want to be exclusive. “Hayden!” he barked.

She jumped backward. “What?”

“You were supposed to… It’s just that… You shouldn’t have…” Hugo wanted to scream. All she had to do was tell Gilda about a Botox party. How could it have gotten all screwed up like this? It was a foolproof plan!

He looked at her alarmed face. “You didn’t happen to mention my name in all of this, did you?”

Hayden looked like she didn’t want to speak, so he tried to soften his expression and smile, as if it was just a casual afterthought with no frightful consequences.

She grinned. “Oh, Mr. Talley, I am so good at keeping secrets, especially about surprise parties. I figured you’d want to tell all the girls yourself.”

Hugo wiped his hand across his forehead and managed a relieved, if not genuine smile. “Oh. Good.” At least he couldn’t be implicated. “All right, get back to work. We have a news show to run.” Hugo looked out at Gilda. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t even focused.

Neither was he.

R
ay shivered inside his lightweight jacket. With the microphone in his grip and his arms wrapped around himself, he studied his notes. There were several points he wanted to make. Through his voice-over, he told the basic story. First, he knew people would immediately identify with Petey Green, the neighbor who had to live with the stench, sound, and stigma of five next-door pigs. So he wanted to make sure to state the city ordinances concerning farm animals on private residential property. But he thought Elva Jones had a point too. After all, she and her family had lived there long before the rest of the neighborhood had moved in. Some research earlier in the day revealed that ten years ago she lost a small farm when the city zoned it commercial, and she was forced to sell it.