Airframe (23 page)

And television at its best was
now
.

So a good frame had nothing to do with the past. Fred Barker’s damning list of prior incidents was actually a problem, because it drew attention to the fading, boring past. She’d have to find a way around it—give it a mention and go on.

What she was looking for was a way to shape the story so that it unfolded
now
, in a pattern that the viewer could follow. The best frames engaged the viewer by presenting the story as
conflict between good and bad, a morality story. Because the audience got that. If you framed a story that way, you got instant acceptance. You were speaking their language.

But because the story also had to unfold quickly, this morality tale had to hang from a series of hooks that did not need to be explained. Things the audience already knew to be true. They already knew big corporations were corrupt, their leaders greedy sexist pigs. You didn’t have to prove that; you just had to mention it. They already knew that government bureaucracies were inept and lazy. You didn’t have to prove that, either. And they already knew that products were cynically manufactured with no concern for consumer safety.

From such agreed-upon elements, she must construct her morality story.

A fast-moving morality story, happening now.

Of course, there was still another requirement for the frame. Before anything else, she must sell the segment to Dick Shenk. She had to come up with an angle that would appeal to Shenk, that would fit his view of the world. And that was no easy matter: Shenk was more sophisticated than the audience. More difficult to please.

Within the
Newsline
offices Shenk was known as the Critic, for the harsh way he shot down proposed segments. Walking around the office, Shenk adopted an affable air, playing the grand old man. But all that changed when he listened to a proposal. Then he became dangerous. Dick Shenk was well educated and smart—very smart—and he could be charming when he wanted to. But at bottom he was mean. He had grown meaner with age, cultivating his nasty streak, regarding it as a key to his success.

Now she was going to take a proposal in to him. She knew Shenk would want a story badly. But he would also be angry about Pacino, angry about Marty, and his anger could quickly turn against Jennifer, and her proposed segment.

To avoid his anger, to sell him this segment, she would
have to proceed carefully. She would have to fashion the story into a shape that, more than anything else, gave vent to Dick Shenk’s hostility and anger, and turned it in a useful direction.

She reached for a notepad, and began to sketch the outlines of what she would say.

Casey got into the elevator in Administration, Richman following her. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why is everybody so angry with King?”

“Because he’s lying,” Casey said. “He knows the aircraft didn’t come within five hundred feet of the Pacific Ocean. Everybody’d be dead if it did. The incident happened at thirty-seven thousand feet. At most the aircraft dropped three or four thousand feet. That’s bad enough.”

“So? He’s getting attention. Making the case for his client. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Yes, he does.”

“Hasn’t Norton settled out of court with him in the past?”

“Three times,” she said.

Richman shrugged. “If you have a strong case, take him to trial.”

“Yes,” Casey said. “But trials are very expensive, and the publicity doesn’t do us any good. It’s cheaper to settle, and just add the cost of his greenmail to the price of our aircraft. The carriers pay that price, and pass it on to the customer. So in the end, every airline passenger pays a few dollars extra for their ticket, in a hidden tax. The litigation tax. The Bradley King tax. That’s how it works in the real world.”

The doors opened, and they came out on the fourth floor. She hurried down the corridor toward her department.

“Where are we going now?” Richman said.

“To get something important that I forgot all about.” She looked at him. “And you did, too.”

Jennifer Malone headed toward Dick Shenk’s office. On the way, she passed his Wall of Fame, a tight arrangement of photographs, plaques, and awards. The photographs showed intimate moments with the rich and famous: Shenk riding horses with Reagan; Shenk on a yacht with Cronkite; Shenk in a Southampton softball game with Tisch; Shenk with Clinton; Shenk with Ben Bradlee. And in the far corner, a photograph of an absurdly young Shenk with shoulder-length hair, an Arriflex mounted on his shoulder, filming John Kennedy in the Oval Office.

Dick Shenk had begun his career in the sixties as a scrappy documentary producer, back in the days when the news divisions were prestige loss leaders for the networks—autonomous, handsomely budgeted, and lavishly staffed. Those were the great days of the CBS
White Papers
and NBC
Reports
. Back then, when Shenk was a kid running around with an Arri, he was in the world, getting real stuff that mattered. With age and success, Shenk’s horizons had narrowed. His world was now limited to his weekend house in Connecticut and his brownstone in New York. If he went anywhere else, it was in a limousine. But despite his privileged upbringing, his Yale education, his beautiful ex-wives, his comfortable existence, and his worldly success, Shenk at sixty was dissatisfied with his life. Riding around in his limousine, he felt unappreciated: not enough recognition, not enough respect for his accomplishments. The questing kid with the
camera had aged into a querulous and bitter adult. Feeling he had been denied respect himself, Shenk in turn denied it to others—adopting a pervasive cynicism toward everything around him. And that was why, she felt certain, he would buy her frame on the Norton story.

Jennifer entered the outer office, stopped by Marian’s desk. “Going to see Dick?” Marian said.

“Is he in?”

She nodded. “You want company?”

“Do I need it?” Jennifer said, raising an eyebrow.

“Well,” Marian said. “He’s been drinking.”

“It’s okay,” Jennifer said. “I can handle him.”

Dick Shenk listened to her, eyes closed, fingers pressed together to make a steeple. From time to time, he nodded slightly as she spoke.

She ran through the proposed segment, hitting all the beats: the Miami incident, the JAA certification story, the TransPacific flight, the jeopardized China sale. The former FAA expert who says the plane has a long history of uncorrected design problems. The aviation reporter who says the company is mismanaged, drugs and gang activity on the factory floor; a controversial new president, trying to boost flagging sales. Portrait of a once-proud company in trouble.

The way to frame the piece, she said, was Rot Beneath the Surface. She laid it out: badly run company makes a shoddy product for years. Knowledgeable people complain, but the company never responds. FAA is in bed with the company and won’t force the issue. Now, at last, the truth comes out. The Europeans balk at certification; the Chinese have cold feet; the plane continues to kill passengers, just as critics said it would. And there’s tape, riveting tape, showing the agonies passengers went through as several died. At the close, it’s obvious to all: the N-22 is a deathtrap.

She finished. There was a long moment of silence. Then Shenk opened his eyes.

“Not bad,” he said.

She smiled.

“What’s the company’s response?” he asked, in a lazy voice.

“Stonewall. The plane’s safe; the critics are lying.”

“Just what you’d expect,” Shenk said, shaking his head. “American stuff is so shitty.” Dick drove a BMW; his tastes ran to Swiss watches, French wines, English shoes. “Everything this country makes is crap,” he said. He slumped back in his chair, as if fatigued by the thought. Then his voice became lazy again, thoughtful: “But what can they offer as proof?”

“Not much,” Jennifer said. “The Miami and Transpacific incidents are still under investigation.”

“Reports due when?”

“Not for weeks.”

“Ah.” He nodded slowly. “I like it. I like it very much. It’s compelling journalism—and it beats the shit out of
60 Minutes
. They did unsafe airplane parts last month. But we’re talking about a whole unsafe aircraft! A deathtrap.
Perfect!
Scare the hell out of everybody.”

“I think so, too,” she said. She was smiling broadly now. He had bought it!

“And I’d love to stick it to Hewitt,” Dick said. Don Hewitt, the legendary producer of
60 Minutes
, was Shenk’s nemesis. Hewitt consistently got better press than Shenk, which rankled. “Those jerkoffs,” he said. “Remember when they did their hard-hitting segment on off-season golf pros?”

She shook her head. “Actually, no …”

“It was a while back,” Dick said. He got fuzzy for a moment, staring into space, and it was clear to her that he had been drinking heavily at lunch. “Never mind. Okay, where are we? You got the FAA guy, you got the reporter, you got tape of Miami. The peg is the home video, we lead with that.”

“Right,” she said, nodding.

“But CNN is going to run it day and night,” he said. “By
next week, it’ll be ancient history. We have to go with this story Saturday.”

“Right,” she said.

“You got twelve minutes,” he said. He spun in his chair looked at the colored strips on the wall, representing the segments in production, where the talent was going to be. “And you got uh, Marty. He’s doing Bill Gates in Seattle on Thursday; we’ll shuttle him to LA Friday. You’ll have him six, seven hours.”

“Okay.”

He spun back. “Go do it.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks, Dick.”

“You sure you can put it together in time?”

She started collecting her notes. “Trust me.”

As she headed out through Marian’s office, she heard him shout, “Just remember, Jennifer—don’t come back with a
parts
story! I don’t want a fucking
parts
story!”

Casey came into the QA office with Richman. Norma was back from lunch, lighting another cigarette. “Norma,” she said, “have you seen a videotape around here? One of those little eight-millimeter things?”

“Yeah,” Norma said, “you left it on your desk the other night. I put it away.” She rummaged in her drawer, brought it out. She turned to Richman. “And you got two calls from Marder. He wants you to call him right away.”

“Okay,” Richman said. He walked down the hall to his office. When he was gone, Norma said, “You know, he talks to Marder a lot. I heard it from Eileen.”

“Marder’s getting in with the Norton relatives?”

Norma was shaking her head. “He’s already married Charley’s only daughter, for Christ’s sake.”

“What’re you saying?” Casey said. “Richman’s reporting to Marder?”

“About three times a day.”

Casey frowned. “Why?”

“Good question, honey. I think you’re being set up.”

“For what?”

“I have no idea,” Norma said.

“Something about the China sale?”

Norma shrugged. “I don’t know. But Marder is the best corporate infighter in the history of the company. And he’s good at covering his tracks. I’d be real careful around this kid.” She leaned across her desk, lowered her voice. “When I got back
from lunch,” she said, “nobody was around. The kid keeps his briefcase in his office. So I had a look.”

“And?”

“Richman’s copying everything in sight. He’s got a copy of every memo on your desk. And he’s Xeroxed your phone logs.”

“My phone logs? What’s the point of that?”

“I couldn’t begin to imagine,” Norma said. “But there’s more. I also found his passport. He’s been to Korea five times in the last two months.”

“Korea?” Casey said.

“That’s right, honey. Seoul. Went almost every week. Short trips. One, two days only. Never more than that.”

“But—”

“There’s more,” Norma said. “The Koreans mark entry visas with a flight number. But the numbers on Richman’s passport weren’t commercial flight numbers. They were tail numbers.”

“He went on a private jet?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“A Norton jet?”

Norma shook her head. “No. I talked to Alice in Flight Ops. None of the company jets has been to Korea in the last year. They’ve been shuttling back and forth from Beijing for months. But none to Korea.”

Casey frowned.

“There’s more,” Norma said. “I talked to the Fizer in Seoul. He’s an old beau of mine. Remember when Marder had that dental emergency last month, and took three days off?”

“Yeah …”

“He and Richman were together in Seoul. Fizer heard about it after they’d gone, and was annoyed to be kept out of the loop. Wasn’t invited to any of the meetings they attended. Took it as a personal insult.”

“What meetings?” Casey said.

“Nobody knows.” Norma looked at her. “But be careful around that kid.”

She was in her office, going through the most recent pile of telexes, when Richman poked his head in. “What’s next?” he said cheerfully.

“Something’s come up,” Casey said. “I need you to go to the Flight Standards District Office. See Dan Greene over there, and get copies of the flight plan and the crew list for TPA 545.”

“Don’t we already have that?”

“No, we just have the preliminaries. By now Dan will have the finals. I want them in time for the meeting tomorrow. The office is in El Segundo.”

“El Segundo? That’ll take me the rest of the day.”

“I know, but it’s important.”

He hesitated. “I think I could be more help to you if I stayed here—”

“Get going,” she said. “And call me when you have them.”

The back room of Video Imaging Systems in Glendale was packed with row after row of humming computers, the squat purple-striped boxes of Silicon Graphics Indigo machines. Scott Harmon, his leg in a cast, hobbled over the cables that snaked across the floor.