Killed in the Ratings Page 2

  “So talk away,” I invited.

  “No! In person. In private. But not in your office.”

  “Where then?” I hate games on the phone. “Times Square on New Year’s Eve?”

  “Dammit! I’m going right to the FBI with this. To hell with you and your Network!”

  “Hold it. Don’t hang up.” I heard him grumble, but the line stayed open. “Where does Monica Teobaldi fit in with this?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation. “Nowhere. She’s a friend of mine. She told me about you, said you were smart. Said you could be trusted.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I’m a prince. Can you see your way clear to giving me a little hint of what this is all about?”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because there are eight million stories in the Naked City, and the best way to give yours an unhappy ending is to meet strangers with absolutely no idea of what you’re doing it for. I want at least to know I’m going to be interested.”

  His control was going. “Damn you! Are you interested in your precious Network? The whole goddam industry? Do you want to know the truth about Walter Schick?”

  This fellow certainly had a flair for the right word. Monica was personal, but Walter Schick was business. Walter Schick was Mr. Hewlen’s son-in-law. He was also Tom Falzet’s predecessor as President. He’d served from November until this January, when he’d driven his Mercedes off an icy road near his Connecticut home. He’d been in a coma since, and anyone with a coin to flip could predict his future as well as the doctors could.

  “I’m interested,” I told the phone. “Where and when?”

  “Hotel Cameron, eight tonight. Ask for Vincent. You know where that is?”

  “Of course. I suggested Times Square right off, didn’t I?”

  “Stop making jokes!” The control was shot. “Just remember this: if I’m not there, find a guy named Vern Devlin, and ask him about it.”

  His receiver banged down. I replaced mine gently. I had to go see him. It seemed to me Vincent was intimating that Schick had been half murdered; that the accident that had wrecked his brain hadn’t been an accident. And that the Network, the whole industry was in trouble. What could that mean? CBS put out a contract on our executives?

  Even if it was a pipe dream, if only a tiny percentage of what Vincent seemed to be saying was true, it had to be checked, and I had to be the one to do the checking, Falzet to the contrary. I knew I could trust me.

  One good way to stop your imagination from running away with you is to find out if your facts are really facts. All I knew about my friend Vincent was that he’d learned to speak in Baltimore (from the way he’d said “jayooks”) and that I was meeting him in a sleazy Times Square hotel that night.

  The second one at least, was checkable. I got Jazz to put through a call to the Hotel Cameron to find out if a Mr. Vincent was registered. He wasn’t, but they had a reservation for him, he’d be checking in sometime during the afternoon. So far so good.

  I put a fistful of jelly beans in my pocket, and took the elevator down to my old haunts in Local TV News to look at the file on Walter Schick. It had a lot of information about how he’d gone from selling nylon stockings to selling commercial minutes, then rose step by step to the top of the Network, but nothing about his accident I didn’t already know.

  One thing I was pleased to see wasn’t in the file was a story about his daughter Roxanne’s running away with a smack dealer when she was fifteen. It was right after I’d joined Special Projects, and it turned out with the kind of happy ending nobody believes anymore. The pusher got twenty-five to life, Roxanne got straight, and I got a hefty raise for being the one who found her. And never a word leaked to embarrass her family or the Network.

  It was a fat file. I read it through twice, trying to sneak up on the “truth” Vincent had in store for me. By the time I finished, it was quitting time.

  I bucked the rush of nine-to-fivers sprinting for the exits, went upstairs, and picked up my briefcase. I left the tower and took the bus home.

  “Home” for now was an apartment on Central Park West that I couldn’t possibly have afforded until I was President of the Network. I was apartment-sitting for Rick and Jane Sloan, a couple of college friends of mine of vast and independent means, which freed them from some of life’s more boring trivialities, like work. They had financed an archaeological expedition to Thailand, then decided it would be some bit of great fun to go along. What’s two years, right?

  Everybody has his own idea of fun. I had been stationed for a while in Thailand, during the middle part of the Vietnam fiasco, and Indochina is not a place I associate with fun.

  I was also dog-sitting. Spot started yipping the instant I put the key in the lock. Spot had his points, but he was a sycophant. Nobody could possibly be as happy to see me as that dog pretended to be. When I walked in, he leaped in the air, wagging his tail furiously and licking my face on the fly.

  “Yes, Spot,” I said, “I’m delighted to see you, too.” With one hand, I scratched him behind the ear, while with the other, I picked some dog hairs from my vest.

  Spot was a Samoyed, a breed of medium-sized Siberian sled dog with pointy ears, a perpetually smiling face, and a cloud of pure white fur. His name is a joke. When Rick first showed me the puppy and told me his name was Spot, I said, “What spot?” and he said, “What’s the matter with you, can’t you see that gigantic white spot? Good God, Matt, it covers his entire body!” Rich people can get away with things.

  I filled up Spot’s water dish, put a TV dinner in the oven, then went for a quick shower and change. It was six-thirty when I finished eating, just enough time to walk the dog.

  It was a warm night in late June, but a friendly breeze had blown the pollution away and the air was clear and comfortable. Spot and I headed into the park. He ran around, sniffing rocks and trees for a site he approved of.

  He finally picked a boulder on which a brilliant satirist or an idiotic bigot had spray-painted “WHITE SUPREMICY.” It almost made me ashamed to be a Caucasian.

  Out-of-towners think Central Park at night is a no-man’s land with a mugger behind every bush. Totally untrue. At most, it’s only every fourth or fifth bush. In any case, we escaped without injury. I returned to the apartment, grabbed a handful of change from the lap of an ivory Buddha by the door, transferred my jelly beans to my new suit, locked Spot inside, and headed downtown.

  The Hotel Cameron was a five-story place just off Times Square, maybe a little less seedy than most of the others in the area, but still a hooker’s haven. I passed one in the doorway, a redhead in a magenta dress. She gave me the big phony smile, but when I gave her a little one and a shake of the head, she shrugged to show no hard feelings. For her, the workday wasn’t half over yet.

  The desk clerk was a big fat guy with a tiny bald head. He looked as though he had started dieting, and was reducing from the top down. I could see him in a year’s time with arms and legs like Popeye the Sailor. He was reading, of all things, Forbes magazine.

  “What’s good on the market?” I asked.

  He looked up from his reading, smiling. “I can dream, can’t I? No, look, they’ve got these funny little sayings in the back. Wait.” He shuffled a few pages. “Here’s one. ‘Money is the root of all evil,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘but that’s one evil I’m rooting for.’ Amen, huh?”

  “Amen,” I said.

  “Looking for a room?”

  “Looking for a friend of mine,” I told him. “Is Mr. Vincent here?”

  He checked the register. “I just come on, you know,” he explained. “Vincent, Vincent. Ah, here we go, Charles Vincent, room 414. You ain’t a cop, are you?”

  “No. Do I look like one?”

  “They never do, no more,” he said mournfully.

  I gave him my sympathy, and headed for the elevator.

  “Sorry, pal,” he said sincerely, “elevator’s busted. Stairs to your left.”

  I made a face as I started up the
stairs, thinking that if what Vincent wanted to tell me about was anything less than a plot to napalm Sesame Street, I would personally kick him in his head.

  The stairs were carpeted in a neutral grey-beige, a color the management had picked, no doubt, to blend in with dirt. It was a good thing I was in shape, or the climb and the dust storm I kicked up would have made it impossible to breathe instead of only difficult. I was only puffing a little when I emerged on the fourth floor. The even numbers were across the hall and to my right, so I pointed myself in the right direction and walked to room 414.

  3

  “Now let’s see what terrific prize is waiting for you behind that door!”

  —Monty Hall “Let’s Make a Deal” (ABC)

  THERE WAS NO ANSWER to my knock, but the door hadn’t been locked, or even latched properly. My knuckles caused the door to creak open about thirty-five degrees. A black rectangle was all I could see of the room.

  On the off chance he might have been taking a nap and had foolishly left the door open, I said, “Mr. Vincent?” and walked in.

  I felt for a light switch to the right of the doorway. An overhead light went on, brighter than I expected. I blinked against it for a fraction of a second. When I opened my eyes, I saw the body on the floor.

  My brain hadn’t gotten much further along than being able to say, “Yep, that’s a body on the floor, all right,” when something hit me on the skull, hard. My brain went bright and hot, like a charge of napalm, then dark, like ashes.

  The next coherent thought I had was Wake up and answer the phone, idiot! I didn’t know how long it had been ringing, but the sound cut through my slowly returning consciousness, and got me moving again.

  It’s a conditioned response I share with a lot of people: The phone must be answered. It’s kind of degrading to have a Pavlovian reaction to the ringing of a bell, but I’ve never been able to kick it. I once lost a lady friend over something I interrupted to answer the phone.

  I stood up and saw little flashbulbs go off in front of my face. I grabbed the door and held on. It had been eight o’clock on the dot when I knocked on the door; my watch read just past ten after now, so it hadn’t been a long nap. My vision cleared, and I made for the phone, which was on a table by the window, stepping over the body on the way. It was the act of stepping over the body that made me aware again of exactly what was going on.

  I turned around and took another look at the body. He was lying in a funny position that made him look more like a pile of two-by-fours than a person. He was wearing grey pants, black shoes and socks, and a red-and-white shirt. The red was caused by blood that oozed out around the imitation-pearl-handled switchblade someone had stuck in the middle of his back.

  His face was kind of odd, because it wore such a mild expression. It was a look of distaste, as though he had found a hair in his milk. He was about my age, had straight brown hair. His build was on the small side of medium. Women had probably called him handsome.

  The phone was still ringing. I turned away from the body and answered it.

  “Long distance. I have a person-to-person call for a Mr. Charles Vincent.”

  “Who’s calling, please, Operator?”

  A gruff voice down the line said, “Vernon Devlin.”

  “A Mr. Vernon Devlin,” the operator echoed.

  Well, Vincent, I found him for you, I thought.

  “Mr. Vincent isn’t feeling well, Operator,” I said. “He isn’t able to come to the phone.” I’m a master of understatement.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Devlin said. The operator thanked him and got off the line. “What do you mean, not well?” he demanded. “Is he hurt? Who is this, the police?”

  “No, but it will be pretty soon. Who are you? A friend of Vincent’s?”

  “Yeah, we work together. Who are you?”

  “My name is Cobb. Your friend wanted to meet me and tell me something. He said if anything went wrong to ask you about it. He’s been murdered, what about it?”

  “Dead?” he rasped. People do that all the time. You say, “The school burned down,” and they say, “It caught fire?”

  “Yes, dead,” I assured him. “Stabbed. I just found him.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Absolutely. Look, I want to call the cops, so I’ll make this quick. I’m kind of a troubleshooter for a TV network, and Vincent had some for me to shoot. What do you know about it?”

  “Oh, God,” he said again. “Listen—Cobb is it? This is big. This is very big. Don’t call the cops. Get out of there, and forget about the whole thing.”

  “Forget it, pal. People saw me come up here. I’m calling the cops right now, good-bye.”

  Before I had the receiver an inch away from my ear, Devlin started yelling, “No, no! Wait!”

  I put it back to my ear. “Now what?”

  He sounded relieved. “Okay, I was off base with that suggestion. Call the cops, but don’t tell them anything!”

  “I don’t know anything, putz!” I was getting irritated. Here I was in a cheap hotel room with a lump on my head and a rapidly cooling corpse on the floor, and this clown wants me to play games with the cops. “No way,” I said.

  “Well at least, don’t mention me, okay? Look, I’m putting myself in your hands. My name is Vernon J. Devlin. I live in Fairfax, Virginia, and work in Washington, D.C., for Communications Research Incorporated.”

  “The ratings outfit?” I was doing it now. Everybody knows CRI is the independent research company that does the overnight TV ratings.

  “Uh huh,” he said. “Please, give me just one day on this. One day.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I can tell you all about it. Look. This is Tuesday. I’ve got something important here Wednesday, but I can be in New York on Thursday. Please, give me a break on this. We can’t talk about it on the phone.”

  I let him sweat for a minute. “Okay,” I said finally. “How do you plan to get here?”

  “Train,” he said. “I’ll leave early in the morning and meet you at nine-thirty in Penn Station at the information booth.”

  “Right. Nine-thirty, Thursday. Wear a carnation.”

  “A what?”

  “A carnation. A flower, in your lapel.”

  “Nobody does that anymore,” he said. “I’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

  “Right you are. That’s how I’m going to spot you.”

  “Oh, all right. You won’t regret this, Cobb.”

  “You’d just better be there. Now can I call the—”

  “Police! Don’t move!” There was a crack as the doorknob popped a hole in the plaster.

  I didn’t move. It’s foolish to move when two guys with badges and guns tell you not to. These particular guys were mismatched; a young earnest kid straight out of “Adam-12,” and a dumpy “Car 54” type.

  “What took you so long?” I asked.

  “Never mind that,” Adam told me. “Put down that phone. Hold your hands against the wall.”

  I did. Car 54 gave his gun to Adam, then came over and kicked my feet back and apart, so if I took my hands away from the wall, I’d fall flat on my face. He frisked me expertly, then told me I could straighten up.

  I turned around to see a plainclothesman entering the room. He was a wiry guy. He took off a grey fedora to reveal wiry grey hair. He told me his name was Detective Second Grade Horace A. Rivetz. I suppressed a suicidal impulse to ask him if he was as hard as nails when I told him my name.

  The telephone was still lying on the table, off the hook. Rivetz brushed by me and picked it up. To my astonishment, he still had somebody to talk to. He asked a lot of questions, and said, “I see,” sixteen times.

  Finally he said, “Okay, Mr. Devlin. You going home now? Oh. Okay. Expect somebody from the Fairfax police tomorrow morning. Early. Let me have those phone numbers again. Thank you, Mr. Devlin.”

  He hung up the phone, regarding me dyspeptically. “Well, Mr. Cobb, Mr. Devlin tells me you discoverd the b
ody.”

  I admitted it.

  “Well,” he continued, “I got to clarify the legal situation here. You are not yet under arrest, but I’m detaining you as a witness, and on that basis, I’m gonna inform you of your constitutional rights.” Rivetz had learned to speak in Flatbush. That dialect is supposed to be amusing, but it wasn’t then. He didn’t even have the good grace to be menacing, he was just bored. It was terrifying that a policeman should think finding me alone with a corpse was boring.

  He gave me my rights from memory, not resorting to the Miranda card. I told him I had no desire for an attorney, and that I was giving up the right to remain silent, for now. I was going to tell him a lie, and I wanted to get it over with.

  “What happened, Mr. Cobb? In your own words.”

  I’ve always loved that phrase. Who the hell else’s words could I use? It didn’t happen to anybody else.

  I told Rivetz the whole story, with a couple of exceptions. I edited the contents of Vincent’s phone call to me, especially to omit the name of Walter Schick. There was no reason to keep Devlin out of it anymore, but I downplayed the intensity of his desire to be left out of the picture, and neglected to mention our little appointment for Thursday.

  I told him I’d never met the deceased, but a mutual friend (Monica) had given him my name and told him to look me up when he was in New York, and that he had.

  “He told me he wanted to talk to me about something, and that I should meet him here at eight. When I got here, I found him on the floor, somebody hit me in the head (see this lump?), and I was out for about ten or twelve minutes. The phone woke me up.”

  “When did you get here? At the hotel, I mean?”

  “Couple of minutes before eight.”

  “Sure you didn’t get here sooner? Didn’t have time for a drink, a smoke?”

  “Absolutely. Ask the desk clerk. I talked to him.”

  Rivetz assured me he would, but from the tone of his voice and the expression on his face, Spot would probably have to fix his own breakfast. I had to admit my story was pretty weak.

  While I was talking with Rivetz, more detectives arrived, along with photographers and lab men. They had been buzzing quietly around the room the whole time. Just before the question about drinking and smoking, one had come over and whispered in his ear.