Killed in the Ratings Read online

  I had the Kenny Lewis thing finished by twelve-thirty. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for that kid, even though he was a worthless punk. What chance did he have? All his life, he’d been taken care of, no matter what, and no one would tell him why. If his famous mother set out to deliberately drive him insane, she couldn’t have done a better job. She wouldn’t acknowledge the kid, or even see him; she just couldn’t be bothered. The whole thing made me a little nauseated.

  My next destination was Willowdale private hospital in Greenwich. From the outside, it was the place of my dreams: a rambling, peaceful white house, with a pillared porch and gravel drive, surrounded by a pool-table lawn and shaded by willows and chestnut trees. It looked like a place where no one ever talked loud or sweated.

  The illusion was shattered the moment I stepped inside. Doctors and nurses rushed by on their rounds, and antiseptic perfumed the air. The only perceptible difference between Willowdale and Bellevue was the shape of the windows.

  An elderly lady volunteer at the desk was making clucking noises over a paperback novel. “Such filth!” she muttered, shaking her head. She marked her place with a finger while she told me the way to Walter Schick’s room. As I left her, she resumed clucking.

  A young guy in a white suit was coming out of the room as I was going in, and we bumped into each other.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Are you a doctor?”

  He grinned. “That’s what they have to call me. I’m the intern.”

  “Hi. Matt Cobb.” He told me he was Fred Barber, and we shook hands.

  “Is anything wrong with Mr. Schick?” I asked.

  He scratched his head. “Well, yeah. He had an accident—”

  “No, no. Sorry, I phrased the question stupidly. I meant, I saw you coming out of the room, and I wondered if something had changed.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I get you. No, I just dropped in to bring Mrs. Schick something from the desk.”

  “She’s here?” Sometimes, I can’t say anything that isn’t stupid.

  He ignored it. “She sure is. Every day, hours at a time. She doesn’t even bring a book, just sits there and looks at him. I think we’ll wind up treating her, too. We can’t do anything for him. Maybe you can cheer her up a little.”

  I told him I’d try, and walked in the room. Cynthia Schick stood up, looking almost startled.

  “Mr. Cobb,” she said. “How nice of you to come.” She was a very attractive woman. Only a few neck cords and some highlights of grey in her black hair betrayed the fact that she had told forty good-bye. She was taller than her father, Mr. Hewlen, but had his flinty blue eyes and determined mouth. To borrow a phrase from Jane Russell, she was a full-figured girl, and that figure would have been an asset to a woman half her age.

  She was much more subdued now than I’d ever known her before. Usually, she was the crisp and efficient female executive type, the kind of well-to-do lady who gave more than her name to charity projects; the kind who work as hard to give money away as most people do to earn it.

  “Hello, Mrs. Schick,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.”

  She didn’t answer right away. It’s only good manners to keep your eyes on the person to whom you are speaking, but mine kept being drawn to the patient on the bed.

  When I had known him, Walter Schick had been the classic executive, the perfect complement to his wife. He had been a mover and shaker at the Network and throughout the industry. When his daughter had run away, he’d been impressive even in his helplessness.

  What lay on the bed was a caricature of the man, a five-foot, ten-inch infant with a beard stubble on his face. He resembled Walter Schick a little bit.

  He was being kept alive through the combined efforts of several pharmaceutical companies and by Connecticut Light and Power. Medicines and nutrients were being fed into him by needles stuck into veins of both wrists. Electronic equipment maintained and monitored the rhythms of his body the way Net Ops maintains and monitors the quality of a broadcast signal. His chest rose and fell in rhythm with the cylindrical bellows on the respirator beside the bed.

  The silence became thunderous. I said something, only to hear a human voice.

  “How long have you been here with your husband today, Mrs. Schick?”

  She looked at me calmly. “That’s not my husband,” she said.

  Do you want to know the truth about Waiter Schick? Carlson’s voice echoed in my head.

  “It’s not?” I asked. My voice cracked, but Cynthia Schick took no notice of it.

  “What is a man?” she said. “Surely Matthew Cobb is something more than a tall, handsome young man in a three-piece suit. Walter was action, decision and action. Spirit, Mr. Cobb, and ideas. That was my husband. I haven’t seen him since the accident.”

  She pointed to the bed. “This is what he’s left behind.”

  “Yet the intern tells me you come here every day.”

  She showed me a joyless smile. “Yes, I do. Sometimes I wonder why. It’s like adoring a relic of a saint. Walter was a good man, but he wasn’t a saint.”

  “Why then?”

  “I think it’s because I hope to be here, when ... if ... Walter returns to ...” She pointed again. The figure on the bed made a gurgling sound.

  “I’m very glad you’ve come, Mr. Cobb. I sit here alone, thinking things, keeping them locked up ... sometimes I start feeling as though I’m the one who’s being punished. I need to get some things said. You don’t mind ... ?”

  “Not at all. I’m probably just the right person to tell it to.”

  She looked at me strangely. “What do you ... ? Oh, I think I see. You’re outside the immediate family, yet you know things about us that no one else knows. Is that what you meant?”

  “That,” I said, “and the fact that I got a real good feeling when I heard Roxanne was off drugs and back in school. It’s a privilege to help a family with courage.”

  She went white at that. “It’s strange you should mention that, Mr. Cobb. About courage, I mean. Because I’ve been so confused!” She left her chair, and stood between the respirator and the window, looking outside.

  “The sky is getting cloudy,” she said. She turned to face me.

  The respirator was between us. She seemed hypnotized by the rising and falling of the cylinder with the patient’s breath. “Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if ...” Her voice trailed off.

  She was stroking something. I stood up to see what it was. She was holding the power cord for the respirator. One good yank, and the last of Walter Schick would die.

  “Mrs. Schick,” I said.

  She looked up, startled. “Yes?”

  “Put that down, Mrs. Schick.”

  “Don’t you see, Mr. Cobb, that’s the problem. I just don’t know if I have the courage to do this.” She took a firmer grip on the cord.

  “It takes more courage not to do it,” I said, “and you know it.”

  Tears were on her cheeks, her voice was a whisper. “He’s never coming back,” she said.

  Why can’t I ever go visit anybody anymore? I asked myself. Spot was the only person I hadn’t had a crisis with in two days.

  I was not anxious to see her pull that plug. Whatever you call it, the State of Connecticut would call it premeditated murder. Of course, I could immobilize Mrs. Schick with one hand, but I had to reach her first, and it would have taken a standing broad jump over the bed to reach her before she could act.

  “But what if you’ve got it wrong?” I said suddenly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You say he’s away; that whatever is Walter, his mind, his soul, is gone and only the shell is left behind. But what if he’s not away? What if he’s only trapped? Trapped, way deep inside, so deep he can’t get out? Or at least, not yet. What if he’s ... if he’s a prisoner in his own body?”

  “A prisoner?” she asked thoughtfully.

  “Of course! And what you’re thinking of doing is to bur
n down the prison, with your husband inside! Even the worst murderer gets treated better than that, Mrs. Schick. Don’t do it to your husband.”

  Then she did something so bizarre, it had to be genuine. She dropped the wire, composed her face, brushed the dirt from her hands and said. “You’re quite right, Mr. Cobb. Thank you.”

  And that was it. I was dumbfounded. I was steeling myself for the Hollywood finish, the fainting, or the body-wracking sobs, and what I got seemed like an anticlimax. Nobody could fake a thing like that.

  She picked up her purse. “Can I impose on you one more time, Mr. Cobb? Roxanne drove me here, and I’d rather not wait for her to come back. If I call her, would you drive me home?”

  8

  “... the life you save may be your own.”

  —National Safety Council, public service announcement

  I KNEW THE WAY there. I pointed the car in the right direction and headed for the other side of Greenwich, the Sound shore. After a while, I said, “Mrs. Schick, I have to ask you some questions you probably don’t want to hear.”

  She shrugged. “I can hardly refuse you, can I?” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that.

  “I want to know about your husband’s accident.”

  “My God, why?”

  “Safety study for the Personnel Department,” I lied. “Just tell me what happened. January eleventh, right? He went out alone?”

  “Yes, he went out alone. That was the night we had a terrible ice storm. Roxanne was home from college, on semester break, and she had gone to a friend’s house earlier in the evening, you know how the children can’t wait to see each other and compare notes at the end of a term.

  “The storm hit after Roxanne had gone. She called just after eleven o’clock. She said she heard the roads were impassable, and that power lines were down, and she didn’t know what to do.

  “She said she was to afraid to drive. Walter told her not to worry, he’d pick her up right away. He took the Mercedes because it was the easiest car to get to.

  “After he drove off, the next time I saw him, he was ... the way he is now. A state policeman came to the door and told me Walter had been in an accident, and brought me to the hospital.”

  “Not Willowdale?” I asked.

  “What? Oh, no. Greenwich Hospital.” She was silent for a few seconds, then said, without expression, “One of the doctors told me he was lucky to be alive.”

  “Where was this, exactly?”

  “We’ll be coming to that stretch of road in a few moments, now,” she said.

  We were on a road built along the top of a ridge, with a steep drop of about fifteen feet to either side. Mrs. Schick said, “The police decided he must have hit a patch of ice and skidded off the road. They said he’d been driving too fast. The car rolled over several times, and Walter wasn’t wearing his seat belt. He was injured all over, but of course, his head was the worst.”

  “Did he usually wear his seat belt?”

  She hesitated. “Not always,” she said after a couple of seconds.

  Famous last words, I thought. It was time for the big money question, but I waited before asking it; I didn’t want to disturb her. But she looked pretty well in control of herself, so I let it rip.

  “Was there any suspicion it wasn’t an accident?”

  “The police didn’t think so.” Her tone indicated how much she thought of the opinion of the police.

  “Did they mention it at all?”

  “Oh, they mentioned it. They said it had to be an accident, because there were no other car tracks to show he’d been forced off the road, and no traces of a person on foot who might have distracted him.”

  That was good enough for me. I’d stop by the State Police barracks and have a word or two with one of the officers, but I was satisfied. Still, Carlson had been killed trying to tell me something, and I had placed myself in a position where I couldn’t afford not to know it. I pressed on.

  “Did—does your husband have any enemies?” I cursed myself for forgetting Walter Schick was still alive.

  “You were right the first time, Matt. My husband has no enemies now.”

  “In other words, you’re saying he used to?”

  “Any man who marries the boss’s daughter is going to have enemies,” she declared. “Any man of talent and ambition is going to have enemies, especially in an industry as competitive as ours. Yes, Walter had enemies.”

  “Who, for instance?”

  “Do you really want me to say it?”

  “Say whatever you think.”

  She gave me a look that told me I asked for it, and said, “Tom Falzet.”

  Tom Falzet. Great. I felt like Pandora with hair on her chest. Every time I asked somebody something, another demon flew out of the box. Now I was sweating the last two Network Presidents.

  “Tom was always afraid of Walter,” she said. “When Walter was in charge of Sales, and Tom in charge of Programming, they were always trying to outdo each other. They both knew one of them would be picked as President when my father stepped upstairs.

  “You know, Matt, my birth was an accident.”

  That called for a double take. “Most are,” I said.

  “What I mean is, my father was already an old man when I was born. He’d poured all his love into the Network. That’s what he built his life around. He would never have favored a man at the Network simply because he was married to me. And it should be like that.

  “But Tom Falzet used it against Walter, joked about it, subtly, of course, but he always kept Father aware that if Walter were to be named President, everyone would assume it was because of me.

  “Walter was the best man for the job. Tom knew it, and Father knew it, too. If it weren’t for the whispers, the insinuations, Father would have stepped aside for Walter years ago. That’s why Father remained active head of the Network so long. I’m sure you know how he is. He wouldn’t tolerate anyone but the best man running the Network, but it would kill him to have the people in the industry say he was unfair.”

  “But then ‘Harbor Heights’ came along,” I suggested.

  Cynthia Schick nodded. She probably knew the details better than I did, but everyone who worked in the Tower had heard of it. It was one of the biggest intramural battles in the history of the broadcasting industry.

  It has to do with the critics I talked about earlier, and their comments on broadcast programming.

  Now, nobody likes to be attacked daily in a newspaper. I’ll bet even Charles Manson didn’t like it. Tom Falzet liked it least of all. He was in charge of Programming at the time, and bore the brunt of the attacks.

  So one day, he came up with an idea to get the critics to lay off: namely, to design a show expressly to please the critics. “Harbor Heights” was born.

  Hell broke loose. Walter Schick was against it from the first. To him would fall the task of convincing advertisers to invest their advertising budgets in the show. He maintained it couldn’t be done, that the public didn’t want that kind of show and had made its opinion clear time after time. He further maintained that if he and his staff did manage to get it sold, the folks who paid the bills (advertisers) would be feeling betrayed when “Harbor Heights” bombed, as it inevitably would.

  The whole Tower was kept in suspense. Everybody from Top Management down to the janitor’s assistants speculated about what Mr. Hewlen’s decision would be.

  The word finally came down. With nose firmly uplifted, the Network would introduce “Harbor Heights” with the new fall season.

  Looking back from the end of that season, it was now easy to see that the old man put it on the air to see who had the right hunches to be President.

  The first episode of “Harbor Heights” made the critics swoon with joy. It had everything they like: rich people, upperclass accents, oh-so-tasteful sex, and “relevance.” It opened with a good rating, too, a 40 share in the CRI ratings. That means forty percent of all the television sets in use that Sunday night were tuned
to “Harbor Heights.”

  That’s a terrific number. It means the show got a good sampling with the audience. They can’t like it if they don’t try it.

  The next week, the share had dropped to 26, though Neilsen and Arbitron did show it a little higher. They’d tried it, but they didn’t like it.

  By the end of another two weeks, the share was down to 16. Cancellation rumors flew, but Falzet hung tough. “Harbor Heights” was moved to Friday. The ratings dropped again.

  After eight shows, “Harbor Heights” was cancelled. Seven percent of the viewing public watched the last episode, which aired late in October.

  Early in November, Walter Schick was named President of the Network. In mid-January, he was put in that bed in Willowdale, half dead.

  I regarded the half widow. “Do you think Tom Falzet was so angry about his failure, and your husband’s promotion, that he tried to have him killed?”

  “I would have no trouble believing it,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Could you believe Roxanne conspired with him to do it?”

  “That’s a disgusting thought!” she snapped.

  “I agree,” I said. “That’s why I don’t think it was anything but an accident. Even if someone, say Falzet, had a way to make Walter go off the road, how could he get him there in the first place? It was your daughter’s call that got him out of the house, and it’s ridiculous to think she’d have been a party to anything like that.”

  I changed the subject. “Does your husband know a man named Vincent Carlson?”

  “No!” she snapped, then, more quietly, “not to my knowledge.”

  “Vernon Devlin?”

  “Again, not that I know of. Why?”

  “A vagrant thought. Never mind.”

  We arrived at the Schick residence, a modern flagstone-and-glass affair built on a bluff overlooking Long Island Sound. I drove the car under the carport. Cynthia Schick invited me in. “Roxanne will be happy to see you,” she said.

  I wanted to see her, too. I accompanied Mrs. Schick inside the house. The living room was walled with glass on three sides, and the numerous potted trees and shrubs inside gave me the feeling of being on display in a terrarium. A middle-aged lady in a grey uniform was giving the south wall a Windex treatment, and the droplets of spray made the Sound and the hazy shape of Long Island beyond look like a mirage.